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The expanding financial markets of the Arab world require sophisticated Arabic NLP tools. To address this need within the banking domain, the Arabic Financial NLP (AraFinNLP) shared task proposes two subtasks: (i) Multi-dialect Intent…

The rise of digital technology has dramatically increased the potential for cyberbullying and online abuse, necessitating enhanced measures for detection and prevention, especially among children. This study focuses on detecting abusive…

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) systems consist of several machine learning components operating together (e.g. intent classification, named entity recognition and resolution). Deep learning models have obtained state of the art results…

African languages are spoken by over a billion people, but are underrepresented in NLP research and development. The challenges impeding progress include the limited availability of annotated datasets, as well as a lack of understanding of…

Multilingual transformer models like mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa have obtained great improvements for many NLP tasks on a variety of languages. However, recent works also showed that results from high-resource languages could not be easily…

Despite remarkable progress in large language models, Urdu-a language spoken by over 230 million people-remains critically underrepresented in modern NLP systems. Existing multilingual models demonstrate poor performance on Urdu-specific…

The lack of publicly available evaluation data for low-resource languages limits progress in Spoken Language Understanding (SLU). As key tasks like intent classification and slot filling require abundant training data, it is desirable to…

Intent classification and slot-filling are essential tasks of Spoken Language Understanding (SLU). In most SLUsystems, those tasks are realized by independent modules. For about fifteen years, models achieving both of themjointly and…

A major focus of recent research in spoken language understanding (SLU) has been on the end-to-end approach where a single model can predict intents directly from speech inputs without intermediate transcripts. However, this approach…

Recent advances in speech-enabled AI, including Google's NotebookLM and OpenAI's speech-to-speech API, are driving widespread interest in voice interfaces globally. Despite this momentum, there exists no publicly available…

Audio large language models (AudioLLMs) enable instruction-following over speech and general audio, but progress is increasingly limited by the lack of diverse, conversational, instruction-aligned speech-text data. This bottleneck is…

Wideband Audio Waveform Evaluation Networks (WAWEnets) are convolutional neural networks that operate directly on wideband audio waveforms in order to produce evaluations of those waveforms. In the present work these evaluations give…

We present first speech recognition systems for the two severely under-resourced Malian languages Bambara and Maasina Fulfulde. These systems will be used by the United Nations as part of a monitoring system to inform and support…

For conversational large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) tasks, up to about two thousand hours of audio is commonly used to train state of the art models. Collection of labeled conversational audio however, is prohibitively…

A key challenge of dialog systems research is to effectively and efficiently adapt to new domains. A scalable paradigm for adaptation necessitates the development of generalizable models that perform well in few-shot settings. In this…

Although researchers and practitioners are pushing the boundaries and enhancing the capacities of NLP tools and methods, works on African languages are lagging. A lot of focus on well resourced languages such as English, Japanese, German,…

Benchmarking plays a pivotal role in assessing and enhancing the performance of compact deep learning models designed for execution on resource-constrained devices, such as microcontrollers. Our study introduces a novel, entirely…

Multi-intent spoken language understanding (SLU) involves two tasks: multiple intent detection and slot filling, which jointly handle utterances containing more than one intent. Owing to this characteristic, which closely reflects…

This paper describes the results of an informal collaboration launched during the African Master of Machine Intelligence (AMMI) in June 2020. After a series of lectures and labs on speech data collection using mobile applications and on…

Speech technology systems struggle with many downstream tasks for child speech due to small training corpora and the difficulties that child speech pose. We apply a novel dataset, SpeechMaturity, to state-of-the-art transformer models to…