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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…

Level assessment for foreign language students is necessary for putting them in the right level group, furthermore, interviewing students is a very time-consuming task, so we propose to automate the evaluation of speaker fluency level by…

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…

Whereas conventional spoken language understanding (SLU) systems map speech to text, and then text to intent, end-to-end SLU systems map speech directly to intent through a single trainable model. Achieving high accuracy with these…

Detecting the user's intent and finding the corresponding slots among the utterance's words are important tasks in natural language understanding. Their interconnected nature makes their joint modeling a standard part of training such…

Though discourse parsing can help multiple NLP fields, there has been no wide language model search done on implicit discourse relation classification. This hinders researchers from fully utilizing public-available models in discourse…

Local/Native South African languages are classified as low-resource languages. As such, it is essential to build the resources for these languages so that they can benefit from advances in the field of natural language processing. In this…

Despite the progress we have recorded in the last few years in multilingual natural language processing, evaluation is typically limited to a small set of languages with available datasets which excludes a large number of low-resource…

The prevalence of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems in spoken language applications has increased significantly in recent years. Notably, many African languages lack sufficient linguistic resources to support the robustness of…

Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa with a population of more than 200 million people. More than 500 languages are spoken in Nigeria and it is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world. Despite this, natural…

Conversational search systems can improve user experience in digital libraries by facilitating a natural and intuitive way to interact with library content. However, most conversational search systems are limited to performing simple tasks…

While many speakers of low-resource languages regularly code-switch between their languages and other regional languages or English, datasets of codeswitched speech are too small to train bespoke acoustic models from scratch or do language…

Africa has a very low doctor-to-patient ratio. At very busy clinics, doctors could see 30+ patients per day -- a heavy patient burden compared with developed countries -- but productivity tools such as clinical automatic speech recognition…

State-of-the-art intent classification (IC) and slot filling (SF) methods often rely on data-intensive deep learning models, limiting their practicality for industry applications. Large language models on the other hand, particularly…

Language model probing is often used to test specific capabilities of models. However, conclusions from such studies may be limited when the probing benchmarks are small and lack statistical power. In this work, we introduce new, larger…

We present Speech-MASSIVE, a multilingual Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) dataset comprising the speech counterpart for a portion of the MASSIVE textual corpus. Speech-MASSIVE covers 12 languages from different families and inherits…

Building conversational systems in new domains and with added functionality requires resource-efficient models that work under low-data regimes (i.e., in few-shot setups). Motivated by these requirements, we introduce intent detection…

In this research, we advanced a spoken language recognition system, moving beyond traditional feature vector-based models. Our improvements focused on effectively capturing language characteristics over extended periods using a specialized…

The Bangla language is the seventh most spoken language, with 265 million native and non-native speakers worldwide. However, English is the predominant language for online resources and technical knowledge, journals, and documentation.…

How can language learning systems be developed for languages that lack sufficient training resources? This challenge is increasingly faced by developers across the African continent who aim to build AI systems capable of understanding and…