Related papers: Awal -- Community-Powered Language Technology for …

This paper introduces a centralized, open-source dataset repository designed to advance NLP and NMT for Assamese, a low-resource language. The repository, available at GitHub, supports various tasks like sentiment analysis, named entity…

Despite representing nearly one-third of the world's languages, African languages remain critically underserved by modern NLP technologies, with 88\% classified as severely underrepresented or completely ignored in computational…

Language models built from various sources are the foundation of today's NLP progress. However, for many low-resource languages, the diversity of domains is often limited, more biased to a religious domain, which impacts their performance…

The advancement of speech technology has predominantly favored high-resource languages, creating a significant digital divide for speakers of most Sub-Saharan African languages. To address this gap, we introduce WAXAL, a large-scale, openly…

Aligning with ACL 2022 special Theme on "Language Diversity: from Low Resource to Endangered Languages", we discuss the major linguistic and sociopolitical challenges facing development of NLP technologies for African languages. Situating…

Advances in speech and language technologies enable tools such as voice-search, text-to-speech, speech recognition and machine translation. These are however only available for high resource languages like English, French or Chinese.…

While the NLP community is generally aware of resource disparities among languages, we lack research that quantifies the extent and types of such disparity. Prior surveys estimating the availability of resources based on the number of…

Faced with a considerable lack of resources in African languages to carry out work in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and artificial intelligence, the research teams of NTeALan association has set…

We present HamRaz, a culturally adapted Persian-language dataset for AI-assisted mental health support, grounded in Person-Centered Therapy (PCT). To reflect real-world therapeutic challenges, we combine script-based dialogue with adaptive…

Language technologies contribute to promoting multilingualism and linguistic diversity around the world. However, only a very small number of the over 7000 languages of the world are represented in the rapidly evolving language technologies…

Research in NLP lacks geographic diversity, and the question of how NLP can be scaled to low-resourced languages has not yet been adequately solved. "Low-resourced"-ness is a complex problem going beyond data availability and reflects…

A commonly observed problem of the state-of-the-art natural language technologies, such as Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri, is that their services do not extend to most developing countries' citizens due to language barriers. Such populations…

Since 2022 we have been exploring application areas and technologies in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) and modern Natural Language Processing (NLP), such as Large Language Models (LLMs), can be employed to foster the usage and…

Language technologies have made enormous progress, especially with the introduction of large language models (LLMs). On traditional tasks such as machine translation and sentiment analysis, these models perform at near-human level. These…

Large, openly licensed speech datasets are essential for building automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, yet many widely spoken languages remain underrepresented in public resources. Pashto, spoken by more than 60 million people, has…

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform healthcare, education, governance and socioeconomic equity, but its benefits remain concentrated in a small number of languages (Bender, 2019; Blasi et al., 2022; Joshi et al.,…

This paper proposes the creation of a Swahili Question Answering (QA) benchmark dataset, aimed at addressing the underrepresentation of Swahili in natural language processing (NLP). Drawing from established benchmarks like SQuAD, GLUE,…

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) affects more than 75 million people worldwide. However, scalable support for practicing everyday conversation is scarce: Low-cost activities such as story reading yield limited improvement. At the same time,…

In this paper we present two datasets for Tamasheq, a developing language mainly spoken in Mali and Niger. These two datasets were made available for the IWSLT 2022 low-resource speech translation track, and they consist of collections of…

This paper reports on the shared tasks organized by the 21st IWSLT Conference. The shared tasks address 7 scientific challenges in spoken language translation: simultaneous and offline translation, automatic subtitling and dubbing,…