Related papers: AfroXLMR-Social: Adapting Pre-trained Language Mod…

Language models are pre-trained using large corpora of generic data like book corpus, common crawl and Wikipedia, which is essential for the model to understand the linguistic characteristics of the language. New studies suggest using…

Domain adaptive pretraining, i.e. the continued unsupervised pretraining of a language model on domain-specific text, improves the modelling of text for downstream tasks within the domain. Numerous real-world applications are based on…

Multilingual pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on several downstream tasks for both high-resourced and low-resourced languages. However, there is still a large performance drop for languages unseen…

Pre-trained Transformer-based speech models have shown striking performance when fine-tuned on various downstream tasks such as automatic speech recognition and spoken language identification (SLID). However, the problem of domain mismatch…

Continual learning has emerged as an important research direction due to the infeasibility of retraining large language models (LLMs) from scratch in the event of new data availability. Of great interest is the domain-adaptive pre-training…

Language models like BERT and SpanBERT pretrained on open-domain data have obtained impressive gains on various NLP tasks. In this paper, we probe the effectiveness of domain-adaptive pretraining objectives on downstream tasks. In…

Language use differs between domains and even within a domain, language use changes over time. For pre-trained language models like BERT, domain adaptation through continued pre-training has been shown to improve performance on in-domain…

Language models pretrained on text from a wide variety of sources form the foundation of today's NLP. In light of the success of these broad-coverage models, we investigate whether it is still helpful to tailor a pretrained model to the…

Sentiment analysis is a fundamental and valuable task in NLP. However, due to limitations in data and technological availability, research into sentiment analysis of African languages has been fragmented and lacking. With the recent release…

Sentiment analysis (SA) plays a vital role in Natural Language Processing (NLP) by ~identifying sentiments expressed in text. Although significant advances have been made in SA for widely spoken languages, low-resource languages such as…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly multilingual, yet open models continue to underperform relative to proprietary systems, with the gap most pronounced for African languages. Continued pre-training (CPT) offers a practical route…

Domain-adaptive continual pretraining (DAPT) is a state-of-the-art technique that further trains a language model (LM) on its pretraining task, e.g., masked language modeling (MLM), when common domain adaptation via LM fine-tuning is not…

Foundation models (FMs) have shown prominent success in a wide range of tasks. Their applicability to specific domain-task pairings relies on the availability of, both, high-quality data and significant computational resources. These…

In recent years, multilingual pre-trained language models have gained prominence due to their remarkable performance on numerous downstream Natural Language Processing tasks (NLP). However, pre-training these large multilingual language…

We evaluate a simple approach to improving zero-shot multilingual transfer of mBERT on social media corpus by adding a pretraining task called translation pair prediction (TPP), which predicts whether a pair of cross-lingual texts are a…

This paper describes our system developed for the SemEval-2023 Task 12 "Sentiment Analysis for Low-resource African Languages using Twitter Dataset". Sentiment analysis is one of the most widely studied applications in natural language…

Africa has over 2000 indigenous languages but they are under-represented in NLP research due to lack of datasets. In recent years, there have been progress in developing labeled corpora for African languages. However, they are often…

Neural machine translation (NMT) has shown impressive performance when trained on large-scale corpora. However, generic NMT systems have demonstrated poor performance on out-of-domain translation. To mitigate this issue, several domain…

Recent advancements in dialogue response selection (DRS) are based on the \textit{task-adaptive pre-training (TAP)} approach, by first initializing their model with BERT~\cite{devlin-etal-2019-bert}, and adapt to dialogue data with…

Task-adaptive pre-training (TAPT) and Self-training (ST) have emerged as the major semi-supervised approaches to improve natural language understanding (NLU) tasks with massive amount of unlabeled data. However, it's unclear whether they…