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

Converging societal and technical factors have transformed language technologies into user-facing applications used by the general public across languages. Machine Translation (MT) has become a global tool, with cross-lingual services now…

LLMs are routinely evaluated on language use, yet their explicit knowledge about linguistic structure remains poorly understood. Existing linguistic benchmarks focus on narrow phenomena, emphasize high-resource languages, and rarely test…

Driven by the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly Audio-LLMs and Omni-models, spoken dialogue systems have evolved significantly, progressively narrowing the gap between human-machine and human-human…

Machine translation (MT) systems that support low-resource languages often struggle on specialized domains. While researchers have proposed various techniques for domain adaptation, these approaches typically require model fine-tuning,…

Massive amounts of contributed content -- including traditional literature, blogs, music, videos, reviews and tweets -- are available on the Internet today, with authors numbering in many millions. Textual information, such as product or…

This paper addresses the critical need for democratizing large language models (LLM) in the Arab world, a region that has seen slower progress in developing models comparable to state-of-the-art offerings like GPT-4 or ChatGPT 3.5, due to a…

We report in this paper, Tamil open-source software community is a vibrant place with software developers, font designers, translators, voice-over artists, and general user testers, who come together for love of their language, and…

Much recent progress in task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems has been driven by available annotation data across multiple domains for training. Over the last few years, there has been a move towards data curation for multilingual ToD…

Artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP) are increasingly being used in customer service to interact with users and answer their questions. The goal of this systematic review is to examine existing research on the use…

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) models have made significant progress in recent years. However, previous studies primarily focus on datasets written by annotators, which has resulted in a gap between academic research and real-world spoken…

Natural language processing (NLP) now shapes many aspects of our world, yet its potential for positive social impact is underexplored. This paper surveys work in ``NLP for Social Good" (NLP4SG) across nine domains relevant to global…

Language identification (LID) is a crucial precursor for NLP, especially for mining web data. Problematically, most of the world's 7000+ languages today are not covered by LID technologies. We address this pressing issue for Africa by…

Addressing the gap in Large Language Model pretrained from scratch with Malaysian context, We trained models with 1.1 billion, 3 billion, and 5 billion parameters on a substantial 349GB dataset, equivalent to 90 billion tokens based on our…

In NLP, text classification is one of the primary problems we try to solve and its uses in language analyses are indisputable. The lack of labeled training data made it harder to do these tasks in low resource languages like Amharic. The…

The digital exclusion of endangered languages remains a critical challenge in NLP, limiting both linguistic research and revitalization efforts. This study introduces the first computational investigation of Comanche, an Uto-Aztecan…

Simultaneous machine translation attempts to translate a source sentence before it is finished being spoken, with applications to translation of spoken language for live streaming and conversation. Since simultaneous systems trade quality…

Ensuring that the benefits of sign language technologies are distributed equitably among all community members is crucial. Thus, it is important to address potential biases and inequities that may arise from the design or use of these…

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,…

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…

Despite the major advances in NLP, significant disparities in NLP system performance across languages still exist. Arguably, these are due to uneven resource allocation and sub-optimal incentives to work on less resourced languages. To…