Related papers: WolBanking77: Wolof Banking Speech Intent Classifi…

We present our journey in training a speech language model for Wolof, an underrepresented language spoken in West Africa, and share key insights. We first emphasize the importance of collecting large-scale, spontaneous, high-quality…

Natural Language Processing (NLP) research has made great advancements in recent years with major breakthroughs that have established new benchmarks. However, these advances have mainly benefited a certain group of languages commonly…

Slot-filling and intent detection are well-established tasks in Conversational AI. However, current large-scale benchmarks for these tasks often exclude evaluations of low-resource languages and rely on translations from English benchmarks,…

The progress of Natural Language Processing (NLP), although fast in recent years, is not at the same pace for all languages. African languages in particular are still behind and lack automatic processing tools. Some of these tools are very…

This paper presents a spell checker and correction tool specifically designed for Wolof, an under-represented spoken language in Africa. The proposed spell checker leverages a combination of a trie data structure, dynamic programming, and…

In this paper, we propose a neural machine translation system for Wolof, a low-resource Niger-Congo language. First we gathered a parallel corpus of 70000 aligned French-Wolof sentences. Then we developped a baseline LSTM based…

This paper presents the ArBanking77, a large Arabic dataset for intent detection in the banking domain. Our dataset was arabized and localized from the original English Banking77 dataset, which consists of 13,083 queries to ArBanking77…

This work is part of the Kallaama project, whose objective is to produce and disseminate national languages corpora for speech technologies developments, in the field of agriculture. Except for Wolof, which benefits from some language data…

In recent years, we are seeing considerable interest in conversational agents with the rise of large language models (LLMs). Although they offer considerable advantages, LLMs also present significant risks, such as hallucination, which…

This paper presents the proof-of-concept of the first automatic voice assistant ever built in Wolof language, the main vehicular language spoken in Senegal. This voicebot is the result of a collaborative research project between Orange…

For many of the 700 million illiterate people around the world, speech recognition technology could provide a bridge to valuable information and services. Yet, those most in need of this technology are often the most underserved by it. In…

Dialogue generation is an important NLP task fraught with many challenges. The challenges become more daunting for low-resource African languages. To enable the creation of dialogue agents for African languages, we contribute the first…

As voice assistants cement their place in our technologically advanced society, there remains a need to cater to the diverse linguistic landscape, including colloquial forms of low-resource languages. Our study introduces the first-ever…

African languages remain underrepresented in natural language processing (NLP), with most corpora limited to formal registers that fail to capture the vibrancy of everyday communication. This work addresses this gap for Shona, a Bantu…

Almost none of the 2,000+ languages spoken in Africa have widely available automatic speech recognition systems, and the required data is also only available for a few languages. We have experimented with two techniques which may provide…

Growing digital archives and improving algorithms for automatic analysis of text and speech create new research opportunities for fundamental research in phonetics. Such empirical approaches allow statistical evaluation of a much larger set…

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is rapidly transforming research methodologies across disciplines, yet African languages remain largely underrepresented in this technological shift. This paper provides the first comprehensive overview of…

Speakers of under-represented languages face both a language barrier, as most online knowledge is in a few dominant languages, and a modality barrier, since information is largely text-based while many languages are primarily oral. We…

Recent large-scale Spoken Language Understanding datasets focus predominantly on English and do not account for language-specific phenomena such as particular phonemes or words in different lects. We introduce ITALIC, the first large-scale…

Spoken dialog systems are slowly becoming and integral part of the human experience due to their various advantages over textual interfaces. Spoken language understanding (SLU) systems are fundamental building blocks of spoken dialog…