Related papers: Language Diversity: Evaluating Language Usage and …

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 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…

This thesis investigates geographic dialect alignment in place-informed social media communities, focussing on New Zealand-related Reddit communities. By integrating qualitative analyses of user perceptions with computational methods, the…

This paper reports some difficulties and some results when using dense retrievers on Amharic, one of the low-resource languages spoken by 120 millions populations. The efforts put and difficulties faced by University Addis Ababa toward…

If today some African languages like Swahili have enough resources to develop high-performing Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems, many other languages spoken on the continent are still lacking such support. For these languages, still…

Language models are the foundation of current neural network-based models for natural language understanding and generation. However, research on the intrinsic performance of language models on African languages has been extremely limited,…

Online Knowledge Repositories (OKRs) like Wikipedia offer communities a way to share and preserve information about themselves and their ways of living. However, for communities with low-resourced languages -- including most African…

Abusive language is a growing concern in many social media platforms. Repeated exposure to abusive speech has created physiological effects on the target users. Thus, the problem of abusive language should be addressed in all forms for…

The increasing occurrence, forms, and negative effects of misinformation on social media platforms has necessitated more misinformation detection tools. Currently, work is being done addressing COVID-19 misinformation however, there are no…

African languages have far less in-language content available digitally, making it challenging for question answering systems to satisfy the information needs of users. Cross-lingual open-retrieval question answering (XOR QA) systems --…

Most social media users come from the Global South, where harmful content usually appears in local languages. Yet, AI-driven moderation systems struggle with low-resource languages spoken in these regions. Through semi-structured interviews…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technologies have transformed human-computer interaction; however, low-resource languages in Africa remain significantly underrepresented in both research and practical applications. This study…

Recent advances in the pre-training of language models leverage large-scale datasets to create multilingual models. However, low-resource languages are mostly left out in these datasets. This is primarily because many widely spoken…

Developing Information Retrieval (IR) tools and techniques in African languages suffers from the dual problems of a lack of algorithms and very small test data collections. This affects the creation of practical IR systems and limits the…

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…

Many multilingual communities, including numerous in Africa, frequently engage in code-switching during conversations. This behaviour stresses the need for natural language processing technologies adept at processing code-switched text.…

Neural retrieval and GPT-style generative models rely on large, high-quality supervised data, which is still scarce for low-resource languages such as Amharic. We release an Amharic data resource consisting of two datasets that supports…

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…

African languages are severely under-represented in NLP research due to lack of datasets covering several NLP tasks. While there are individual language specific datasets that are being expanded to different tasks, only a handful of NLP…

The proliferation of fake news has emerged as a significant threat to the integrity of information dissemination, particularly on social media platforms. Misinformation can spread quickly due to the ease of creating and disseminating…