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The prevalence of digital media and evolving sociopolitical dynamics have significantly amplified the dissemination of hateful content. Existing studies mainly focus on classifying texts into binary categories, often overlooking the…
South Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) present a complex linguistic landscape with languages such as Zulu, Sepedi, Afrikaans, French, English, and Tshiluba (Ciluba), which creates unique challenges for AI-driven translation…
The use of multilingual language models for tasks in low and high-resource languages has been a success story in deep learning. In recent times, Arabic has been receiving widespread attention on account of its dialectal variance. While…
This work explores fine-tuning OpenAI's Whisper automatic speech recognition (ASR) model for Amharic, a low-resource language, to improve transcription accuracy. While the foundational Whisper model struggles with Amharic due to limited…
Africa's rich linguistic diversity remains significantly underrepresented in speech technologies, creating barriers to digital inclusion. To alleviate this challenge, we systematically map the continent's speech space of datasets and…
Digital platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and Amazon Mechanical Turk have transformed the study of human behavior and provided access to new subject pools for academic research. In our study, we leverage the Facebook…
In today's global digital landscape, misinformation transcends linguistic boundaries, posing a significant challenge for moderation systems. Most approaches to misinformation detection are monolingual, focused on high-resource languages,…
Despite the widespread adoption of Large language models (LLMs), their remarkable capabilities remain limited to a few high-resource languages. Additionally, many low-resource languages (\eg African languages) are often evaluated only on…
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…
Assessing the veracity of a claim made online is a complex and important task with real-world implications. When these claims are directed at communities with limited access to information and the content concerns issues such as healthcare…
Despite the impressive performance of current AI models reported across various tasks, performance reports often do not include evaluations of how these models perform on the specific groups that will be impacted by these technologies.…
Machine learning techniques have conquered many different tasks in speech and natural language processing, such as speech recognition, information extraction, text and speech generation, and human machine interaction using natural language…
African languages are numerous, complex and low-resourced. The datasets required for machine translation are difficult to discover, and existing research is hard to reproduce. Minimal attention has been given to machine translation for…
Pretrained language models (PLMs) for African languages are continually improving, but the reasons behind these advances remain unclear. This paper presents the first systematic investigation into probing PLMs for linguistic knowledge about…
Historically, researchers and consumers have noticed a decrease in quality when applying NLP tools to minority variants of languages (i.e. Puerto Rican Spanish or Swiss German), but studies exploring this have been limited to a select few…
The proliferation of online offensive language necessitates the development of effective detection mechanisms, especially in multilingual contexts. This study addresses the challenge by developing and introducing novel datasets for…
Text classifiers are applied at scale in the form of one-size-fits-all solutions. Nevertheless, many studies show that classifiers are biased regarding different languages and dialects. When measuring and discovering these biases, some gaps…
Africa is home to over one-third of the world's languages, yet remains underrepresented in AI research. We introduce Afri-MCQA, the first Multilingual Cultural Question-Answering benchmark covering 7.5k Q&A pairs across 15 African languages…
The availability of different pre-trained semantic models enabled the quick development of machine learning components for downstream applications. Despite the availability of abundant text data for low resource languages, only a few…
Content moderation research has recently made significant advances, but remains limited in serving the majority of the world's languages due to the lack of resources, leaving millions of vulnerable users to online hostility. This work…