相关论文: Toward verbalizing ontologies in isiZulu

Basic vocabulary in many Sulawesi Austronesian languages includes forms resisting reconstruction to any proto-form with phonological patterns inconsistent with inherited roots, but whether this non-conforming vocabulary represents…

Spoken dialog systems are slowly becoming and integral part of the human experience due to their various advantages over textual interfaces. Spoken language understanding (SLU) systems are fundamental building blocks of spoken dialog…

This paper introduces two multilingual government themed corpora in various South African languages. The corpora were collected by gathering the South African Government newspaper (Vuk'uzenzele), as well as South African government speeches…

Developing narrative and comprehension skills in early childhood is critical for later literacy. However, teachers in large preschool classrooms struggle to accurately identify students who require intervention. We present a system for…

Non-native speakers show difficulties with spoken word processing. Many studies attribute these difficulties to imprecise phonological encoding of words in the lexical memory. We test an alternative hypothesis: that some of these…

We introduce IsalProgram (Instruction Set and Language for Programming), a novel assembly-like programming language with three distinctive theoretical properties: (1) it is a regular language in the sense of formal language theory, meaning…

What makes some types of languages more probable than others? For instance, we know that almost all spoken languages contain the vowel phoneme /i/; why should that be? The field of linguistic typology seeks to answer these questions and,…

Subwords have become the standard units of text in NLP, enabling efficient open-vocabulary models. With algorithms like byte-pair encoding (BPE), subword segmentation is viewed as a preprocessing step applied to the corpus before training.…

We present our journey in training a speech language model for Wolof, an underrepresented language spoken in West Africa, and share key insights. We first emphasize the importance of collecting large-scale, spontaneous, high-quality…

Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…

Linguistic typology studies the range of structures present in human language. The main goal of the field is to discover which sets of possible phenomena are universal, and which are merely frequent. For example, all languages have vowels,…

A key distinguishing feature of conversational recommender systems over traditional recommender systems is their ability to elicit user preferences using natural language. Currently, the predominant approach to preference elicitation is to…

Can large language models converse in languages virtually absent from their training data? We investigate this question through a case study on Tulu, a Dravidian language with over 2 million speakers but minimal digital presence. Rather…

There are more than 2000 living languages in Africa, most of which have been bypassed by advances in language technology. Current leading LLMs exhibit strong performance on a number of the most common languages (e.g. Swahili or Yoruba), but…

Virtual Personal Assistants like Siri have great potential but such developments hit the fundamental problem of how to make computational devices that understand human speech. Natural language understanding is one of the more disappointing…

A natural language (or ordinary language) is a language that is spoken, written, or signed by humans for general-purpose communication, as distinguished from formal languages (such as computer-programming languages or the "languages" used…

Recent advances in word embeddings and language models use large-scale, unlabelled data and self-supervised learning to boost NLP performance. Multilingual models, often trained on web-sourced data like Wikipedia, face challenges: few…

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…

Dialogue generation is an important NLP task fraught with many challenges. The challenges become more daunting for low-resource African languages. To enable the creation of dialogue agents for African languages, we contribute the first…

We develop automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for stories told by Afrikaans and isiXhosa preschool children. Oral narratives provide a way to assess children's language development before they learn to read. We consider a range of…