Related papers: Language Diversity: Evaluating Language Usage and …
In contrast to many decades of research on oral code-switching, the study of written multilingual productions has only recently enjoyed a surge of interest. Many open questions remain regarding the sociolinguistic underpinnings of written…
For many of the 700 million illiterate people around the world, speech recognition technology could provide a bridge to valuable information and services. Yet, those most in need of this technology are often the most underserved by it. In…
Sentiment analysis is a fundamental and valuable task in NLP. However, due to limitations in data and technological availability, research into sentiment analysis of African languages has been fragmented and lacking. With the recent release…
Emerging digital technologies are exacerbating the existing divide in Open Access Data (OAD) between high-and low-resource languages, excluding many communities from participating in the global digital transformation. In this PhD proposal,…
Social media often serves as a breeding ground for various hateful and offensive content. Identifying such content on social media is crucial due to its impact on the race, gender, or religion in an unprejudiced society. However, while…
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is today a very active field of research and innovation. Many applications need however big sets of data for supervised learning, suitably labelled for the training purpose. This includes applications for…
The prevalence of social media presents a growing opportunity to collect and analyse examples of English varieties. Whilst usage of these varieties was - and, in many cases, still is - used only in spoken contexts or hard-to-access private…
Toxic language is one of the major barrier to safe online participation, yet robust mitigation tools are scarce for African languages. This study addresses this critical gap by investigating automatic text detoxification (toxic to neutral…
In recent studies, it has been shown that Multilingual language models underperform their monolingual counterparts. It is also a well-known fact that training and maintaining monolingual models for each language is a costly and…
AfriVoices-KE is a large-scale multilingual speech dataset comprising approximately 3,000 hours of audio across five Kenyan languages: Dholuo, Kikuyu, Kalenjin, Maasai, and Somali. The dataset includes 750 hours of scripted speech and 2,250…
Evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) on knowledge-intensive tasks and factual accuracy often focus on high-resource languages primarily because datasets for low-resource languages (LRLs) are scarce. In this paper, we present Uhura --…
Public transport systems in many Sub-Saharan countries often receive less attention compared to other sectors, underscoring the need for innovative solutions to improve the Quality of Service (QoS) and overall user experience. This study…
The increasing prevalence of mental disorders globally highlights the urgent need for effective digital screening methods that can be used in multilingual contexts. Most existing studies, however, focus on English data, overlooking critical…
Dialectal Arabic is the primary spoken language used by native Arabic speakers in daily communication. The rise of social media platforms has notably expanded its use as a written language. However, Arabic dialects do not have standard…
Africa has over 2000 indigenous languages but they are under-represented in NLP research due to lack of datasets. In recent years, there have been progress in developing labeled corpora for African languages. However, they are often…
Reproducible benchmarks are crucial in driving progress of machine translation research. However, existing machine translation benchmarks have been mostly limited to high-resource or well-represented languages. Despite an increasing…
An increase in the use of smartphones has laid to the use of the internet and social media platforms. The most commonly used social media platforms are Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. People are sharing their personal…
Speech technologies are transforming interactions across various sectors, from healthcare to call centers and robots, yet their performance on African-accented conversations remains underexplored. We introduce Afrispeech-Dialog, a benchmark…
Social media has effectively become the prime hub of communication and digital marketing. As these platforms enable the free manifestation of thoughts and facts in text, images and video, there is an extensive need to screen them to protect…
Social Media platforms have been seeing adoption and growth in their usage over time. This growth has been further accelerated with the lockdown in the past year when people's interaction, conversation, and expression were limited…