Related papers: AfriScience-MT: Towards Decolonizing Science in Af…
We introduce FrontierScience, a benchmark evaluating expert-level scientific reasoning in frontier language models. Recent model progress has nearly saturated existing science benchmarks, which often rely on multiple-choice knowledge…
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…
Advances in speech and language technologies enable tools such as voice-search, text-to-speech, speech recognition and machine translation. These are however only available for high resource languages like English, French or Chinese.…
Arabic spans over 30 spoken varieties, yet no open-source text-to-speech system unifies them. Key barriers include substantial cross-dialect lexical and phonological divergence, scarce synthesis-grade data, and the absence of a standardized…
A majority of language technologies are tailored for a small number of high-resource languages, while relatively many low-resource languages are neglected. One such group, Creole languages, have long been marginalized in academic study,…
Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved significant advancements across various domains, and corresponding evaluation benchmarks have been continuously refined and improved. In this process, benchmarks in the…
This research article examines the effectiveness of various pretraining strategies for developing machine translation models tailored to low-resource languages. Although this work considers several low-resource languages, including…
This paper introduces AfriHG -- a news headline generation dataset created by combining from XLSum and MasakhaNEWS datasets focusing on 16 languages widely spoken by Africa. We experimented with two seq2eq models (mT5-base and AfriTeVa V2),…
Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and LLaMA have shown incredible proficiency at natural language processing tasks and have even begun to excel at tasks across other modalities such as vision and audio. Despite their success, LLMs…
Scientific document classification is a critical task and often involves many classes. However, collecting human-labeled data for many classes is expensive and usually leads to label-scarce scenarios. Moreover, recent work has shown that…
Low-resource languages such as isiZulu and isiXhosa face persistent challenges in machine translation due to limited parallel data and linguistic resources. Recent advances in large language models suggest that self-reflection, prompting a…
Significant scientific discoveries have driven the progress of human civilisation. The explosion of scientific literature and data has created information barriers across disciplines that have slowed the pace of scientific discovery. Large…
African languages remain underrepresented in natural language processing (NLP), with most corpora limited to formal registers that fail to capture the vibrancy of everyday communication. This work addresses this gap for Shona, a Bantu…
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…
Mental health disorders pose a growing public health concern in the Arab world, emphasizing the need for accessible diagnostic and intervention tools. Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising approach, but their application in Arabic…
Sub-Saharan Africa faces persistently high student-teacher ratios and shortages of qualified teachers, limiting students' access to personalized learning support and formative assessment. To address this challenge, we present Adesua, a…
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly influenced the landscape of language and speech research. Despite this progress, these models lack specific benchmarking against state-of-the-art (SOTA) models tailored…
Large language models trained primarily in a monolingual setting have demonstrated their ability to generalize to machine translation using zero- and few-shot examples with in-context learning. However, even though zero-shot translations…
Recent advancements in large language model(LLM) performance on medical multiple choice question (MCQ) benchmarks have stimulated interest from healthcare providers and patients globally. Particularly in low-and middle-income countries…
High-quality machine translation (MT) can scale to hundreds of languages, setting a high bar for multilingual systems. However, compared to the world's 7,000 languages, current systems still offer only limited coverage: about 200 languages…