Related papers: Where Are We? Evaluating LLM Performance on Africa…
Despite representing nearly one-third of the world's languages, African languages remain critically underserved by modern NLP technologies, with 88\% classified as severely underrepresented or completely ignored in computational…
With over 2,000 languages and potentially millions of speakers, Africa represents one of the richest linguistic regions in the world. Yet, this diversity is scarcely reflected in state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) systems…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming Natural Language Processing (NLP), but their benefits are largely absent for Africa's 2,000 low-resource languages. This paper comparatively analyzes African language coverage across six LLMs,…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results in a wide range of natural language applications. However, they often struggle to recognize low-resource languages, in particular African languages, which are not well…
Large-scale multilingual evaluations, such as MEGA, often include only a handful of African languages due to the scarcity of high-quality evaluation data and the limited discoverability of existing African datasets. This lack of…
Recent advances in word embeddings and language models use large-scale, unlabelled data and self-supervised learning to boost NLP performance. Multilingual models, often trained on web-sourced data like Wikipedia, face challenges: few…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance across various tasks, yet significant disparities remain for non-English languages, and especially native African languages. This paper addresses these disparities by creating…
Despite comprising one-third of global languages, African languages are critically underrepresented in Artificial Intelligence (AI), threatening linguistic diversity and cultural heritage. Ghanaian languages, in particular, face an alarming…
Pretrained language models (PLMs) for African languages are continually improving, but the reasons behind these advances remain unclear. This paper presents the first systematic investigation into probing PLMs for linguistic knowledge about…
Over the years, there have been campaigns to include the African languages in the growing research on machine translation (MT) in particular, and natural language processing (NLP) in general. Africa has the highest language diversity, with…
This study examines the digital representation of African languages and the challenges this presents for current language detection tools. We evaluate their performance on Yoruba, Kinyarwanda, and Amharic. While these languages are spoken…
Large language models (LLMs) have received a lot of attention in natural language processing (NLP) research because of their exceptional performance in understanding and generating human languages. However, low-resource languages are left…
Researchers working on low-resource languages face persistent challenges due to limited data availability and restricted access to computational resources. Although most large language models (LLMs) are predominantly trained in…
Historically, researchers and consumers have noticed a decrease in quality when applying NLP tools to minority variants of languages (i.e. Puerto Rican Spanish or Swiss German), but studies exploring this have been limited to a select few…
Although LLMs have attained significant success in high-resource languages, their capacity in low-resource linguistic environments like Kannada and Arabic is not yet fully understood. This work benchmarking the performance of multilingual…
Large language models (LLMs) have the potential of being useful tools that can automate tasks and assist humans. However, these models are more fluent in English and more aligned with Western cultures, norms, and values. Arabic-specific…
Recent advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) has led to the proliferation of large pretrained language models. These models have been shown to yield good performance, using in-context learning, even on unseen tasks and…
Multilingual Large Language Models (MLLMs) represent a pivotal advancement in democratizing artificial intelligence across linguistic boundaries. While theoretical foundations are well-established, practical implementation guidelines remain…
Aligning with ACL 2022 special Theme on "Language Diversity: from Low Resource to Endangered Languages", we discuss the major linguistic and sociopolitical challenges facing development of NLP technologies for African languages. Situating…
Over the past three years, the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has had a profound impact on multiple areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly in Natural Language Processing (NLP) across diverse languages,…