Related papers: AfriMTEB and AfriE5: Benchmarking and Adapting Tex…

Traditional text embedding benchmarks primarily evaluate embedding models' capabilities to capture semantic similarity. However, more advanced NLP tasks require a deeper understanding of text, such as safety and factuality. These tasks…

The evaluation of English text embeddings has transitioned from evaluating a handful of datasets to broad coverage across many tasks through benchmarks such as MTEB. However, this is not the case for multilingual text embeddings due to a…

Low-resource languages serve as invaluable repositories of human history, preserving cultural and intellectual diversity. Despite their significance, they remain largely absent from modern natural language processing systems. While progress…

Since the release of ChatGPT, the field of Natural Language Processing has experienced rapid advancements, particularly in Large Language Models (LLMs) and their multimodal counterparts, Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). Despite their…

Recently, embedding resources, including models, benchmarks, and datasets, have been widely released to support a variety of languages. However, the Dutch language remains underrepresented, typically comprising only a small fraction of the…

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,…

We introduce a novel suite of state-of-the-art bilingual text embedding models that are designed to support English and another target language. These models are capable of processing lengthy text inputs with up to 8192 tokens, making them…

We present the first Africentric SemEval Shared task, Sentiment Analysis for African Languages (AfriSenti-SemEval) - The dataset is available at https://github.com/afrisenti-semeval/afrisent-semeval-2023. AfriSenti-SemEval is a sentiment…

Transfer learning with a unified Transformer framework (T5) that converts all language problems into a text-to-text format was recently proposed as a simple and effective transfer learning approach. Although a multilingual version of the T5…

In this paper, we focus on the task of multilingual machine translation for African languages and describe our contribution in the 2021 WMT Shared Task: Large-Scale Multilingual Machine Translation. We introduce MMTAfrica, the first…

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…

Africa is home to over 2,000 languages from more than six language families and has the highest linguistic diversity among all continents. These include 75 languages with at least one million speakers each. Yet, there is little NLP research…

Medical text embedding models are foundational to a wide array of healthcare applications, ranging from clinical decision support and biomedical information retrieval to medical question answering, yet they remain hampered by two critical…

We present Belebele, a multiple-choice machine reading comprehension (MRC) dataset spanning 122 language variants. Significantly expanding the language coverage of natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks, this dataset enables the…

The aim of SemEval-2024 Task 1, "Semantic Textual Relatedness for African and Asian Languages" is to develop models for identifying semantic textual relatedness (STR) between two sentences using multiple languages (14 African and Asian…

In this work, we introduce the construction of a machine translation (MT) assisted and human-in-the-loop multilingual parallel corpus with annotations of multi-word expressions (MWEs), named AlphaMWE. The MWEs include verbal MWEs (vMWEs)…

This paper presents E5, a family of state-of-the-art text embeddings that transfer well to a wide range of tasks. The model is trained in a contrastive manner with weak supervision signals from our curated large-scale text pair dataset…

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…

Comparing human and model performance offers a valuable perspective for understanding the strengths and limitations of embedding models, highlighting where they succeed and where they fail to capture meaning and nuance. However, such…

A rising interest in the modality extension of foundation language models warrants discussion on the most effective, and efficient, multimodal training approach. This work focuses on neural machine translation (NMT) and proposes a joint…