Related papers: AfriNLLB: Efficient Translation Models for African…

This paper describes Tencent's multilingual machine translation systems for the WMT22 shared task on Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for African Languages. We participated in the $\mathbf{constrained}$ translation track in which…

This paper examines the problem of adapting neural machine translation systems to new, low-resourced languages (LRLs) as effectively and rapidly as possible. We propose methods based on starting with massively multilingual "seed models",…

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is rapidly transforming research methodologies across disciplines, yet African languages remain largely underrepresented in this technological shift. This paper provides the first comprehensive overview of…

This study examines the cross-linguistic effectiveness of transfer learning for low-resource machine translation by fine-tuning models initially trained on typologically similar high-resource languages, using limited data from the target…

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…

Despite recent progress in multilingual speech processing, African languages remain under-represented in both research and deployed systems, particularly when it comes to strong, open-weight encoders that transfer well under low-resource…

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently exhibited impressive general-purpose capabilities by leveraging vision foundation models to encode the core concepts of images into representations. These are then combined with…

The study explores the integration of transfer learning (TL) with mobile-enabled convolutional neural networks (MbNets) to enhance Arabic Handwritten Character Recognition (AHCR). Addressing challenges like extensive computational…

Yor\`ub\'a an African language with roughly 47 million speakers encompasses a continuum with several dialects. Recent efforts to develop NLP technologies for African languages have focused on their standard dialects, resulting in…

Hy-MT2 is a family of fast-thinking multilingual translation models designed for complex real-world scenarios. It includes three model sizes: 1.8B, 7B, and 30B-A3B (MoE), all of which support translation among 33 languages and effectively…

We present the Thiomi Dataset, a large-scale multimodal corpus spanning ten African languages across four language families: Swahili, Kikuyu, Kamba, Kimeru, Luo, Maasai, Kipsigis, Somali (East Africa); Wolof (West Africa); and Fulani…

In the past year, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in tasks such as visual question answering, visual understanding and reasoning. However, the extensive model size and high training and…

As large language models (LLMs) grow and develop, so do their data demands. This is especially true for multilingual LLMs, where the scarcity of high-quality and readily available data online has led to a multitude of synthetic dataset…

This paper presents LOLA, a massively multilingual large language model trained on more than 160 languages using a sparse Mixture-of-Experts Transformer architecture. Our architectural and implementation choices address the challenge of…

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…

Providing better language tools for low-resource and endangered languages is imperative for equitable growth. Recent progress with massively multilingual pretrained models has proven surprisingly effective at performing zero-shot transfer…

We present the first shared task on Semantic Textual Relatedness (STR). While earlier shared tasks primarily focused on semantic similarity, we instead investigate the broader phenomenon of semantic relatedness across 14 languages:…

The Arabic language is among the most popular languages in the world with a huge variety of dialects spoken in 22 countries. In this study, we address the problem of classifying 18 Arabic dialects of the QADI dataset of Arabic tweets. RNN…

Recent advances in neural machine translation (NMT) have led to state-of-the-art results for many European-based translation tasks. However, despite these advances, there is has been little focus in applying these methods to African…

Large language models hold significant promise in multilingual applications. However, inherent biases stemming from predominantly English-centric pre-training have led to the widespread practice of pre-translation, i.e., translating…