Daily Papers

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is becoming a dominant subset of artificial intelligence as the need to help machines understand human language looks indispensable. Several NLP applications are ubiquitous, partly due to the myriads of datasets being churned out daily through mediums like social networking sites. However, the growing development has not been evident in most African languages due to the persisting resource limitation, among other issues. Yorùbá language, a tonal and morphologically rich African language, suffers a similar fate, resulting in limited NLP usage. To encourage further research towards improving this situation, this systematic literature review aims to comprehensively analyse studies addressing NLP development for Yorùbá, identifying challenges, resources, techniques, and applications. A well-defined search string from a structured protocol was employed to search, select, and analyse 105 primary studies between 2014 and 2024 from reputable databases. The review highlights the scarcity of annotated corpora, limited availability of pre-trained language models, and linguistic challenges like tonal complexity and diacritic dependency as significant obstacles. It also revealed the prominent techniques, including rule-based methods, among others. The findings reveal a growing body of multilingual and monolingual resources, even though the field is constrained by socio-cultural factors such as code-switching and desertion of language for digital usage. This review synthesises existing research, providing a foundation for advancing NLP for Yorùbá and in African languages generally. It aims to guide future research by identifying gaps and opportunities, thereby contributing to the broader inclusion of Yorùbá and other under-resourced African languages in global NLP advancements.

This paper presents Yankari, a large-scale monolingual dataset for the Yoruba language, aimed at addressing the critical gap in Natural Language Processing (NLP) resources for this important West African language. Despite being spoken by over 30 million people, Yoruba has been severely underrepresented in NLP research and applications. We detail our methodology for creating this dataset, which includes careful source selection, automated quality control, and rigorous data cleaning processes. The Yankari dataset comprises 51,407 documents from 13 diverse sources, totaling over 30 million tokens. Our approach focuses on ethical data collection practices, avoiding problematic sources and addressing issues prevalent in existing datasets. We provide thorough automated evaluations of the dataset, demonstrating its quality compared to existing resources. The Yankari dataset represents a significant advancement in Yoruba language resources, providing a foundation for developing more accurate NLP models, supporting comparative linguistic studies, and contributing to the digital accessibility of the Yoruba language.

A movie that is thoroughly enjoyed and recommended by an individual might be hated by another. One characteristic of humans is the ability to have feelings which could be positive or negative. To automatically classify and study human feelings, an aspect of natural language processing, sentiment analysis and opinion mining were designed to understand human feelings regarding several issues which could affect a product, a social media platforms, government, or societal discussions or even movies. Several works on sentiment analysis have been done on high resource languages while low resources languages like Yoruba have been sidelined. Due to the scarcity of datasets and linguistic architectures that will suit low resource languages, African languages "low resource languages" have been ignored and not fully explored. For this reason, our attention is placed on Yoruba to explore sentiment analysis on reviews of Nigerian movies. The data comprised 1500 movie reviews that were sourced from IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, Letterboxd, Cinemapointer and Nollyrated. We develop sentiment classification models using the state-of-the-art pre-trained language models like mBERT and AfriBERTa to classify the movie reviews.

We investigate the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) for text diacritization in two typologically distinct languages: Arabic and Yoruba. To enable a rigorous evaluation, we introduce a novel multilingual dataset MultiDiac, with diverse samples that capture a range of diacritic ambiguities. We evaluate 14 LLMs varying in size, accessibility, and language coverage, and benchmark them against 6 specialized diacritization models. Additionally, we fine-tune four small open-source models using LoRA for Yoruba. Our results show that many off-the-shelf LLMs outperform specialized diacritization models for both Arabic and Yoruba, but smaller models suffer from hallucinations. Fine-tuning on a small dataset can help improve diacritization performance and reduce hallucination rates.

Yor\`ub\'a is a widely spoken West African language with a writing system rich in orthographic and tonal diacritics. They provide morphological information, are crucial for lexical disambiguation, pronunciation and are vital for any computational Speech or Natural Language Processing tasks. However diacritic marks are commonly excluded from electronic texts due to limited device and application support as well as general education on proper usage. We report on recent efforts at dataset cultivation. By aggregating and improving disparate texts from the web and various personal libraries, we were able to significantly grow our clean Yor\`ub\'a dataset from a majority Bibilical text corpora with three sources to millions of tokens from over a dozen sources. We evaluate updated diacritic restoration models on a new, general purpose, public-domain Yor\`ub\'a evaluation dataset of modern journalistic news text, selected to be multi-purpose and reflecting contemporary usage. All pre-trained models, datasets and source-code have been released as an open-source project to advance efforts on Yor\`ub\'a language technology.

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 prioritise support for the languages with the most speakers first, resulting in piecemeal ability across disparate languages. We contend that a regionally focussed approach is more efficient, and present a case study for Uganda, a country with high linguistic diversity. We describe the development of Sunflower 14B and 32B, a pair of models based on Qwen 3 with state of the art comprehension in the majority of all Ugandan languages. These models are open source and can be used to reduce language barriers in a number of important practical applications.

Although LLMs have been extremely effective in a large number of complex tasks, their understanding and functionality for regional languages and cultures are not well studied. In this paper, we explore the ability of various LLMs to comprehend the cultural aspects of two regional languages: Malayalam (state of Kerala, India) and Yoruba (West Africa). Using Hofstede's six cultural dimensions: Power Distance (PDI), Individualism (IDV), Motivation towards Achievement and Success (MAS), Uncertainty Avoidance (UAV), Long Term Orientation (LTO), and Indulgence (IVR), we quantify the cultural awareness of LLM-based responses. We demonstrate that although LLMs show a high cultural similarity for English, they fail to capture the cultural nuances across these 6 metrics for Malayalam and Yoruba. We also highlight the need for large-scale regional language LLM training with culturally enriched datasets. This will have huge implications for enhancing the user experience of chat-based LLMs and also improving the validity of large-scale LLM agent-based market research.

There is a major shortage of Speech-to-Speech Translation (S2ST) datasets for high resource-to-low resource language pairs such as English-to-Yoruba. Thus, in this study, we curated the Bilingual English-to-Yoruba Speech-to-Speech Translation Corpus Version 1 (BENYO-S2ST-Corpus-1). The corpus is based on a hybrid architecture we developed for large-scale direct S2ST corpus creation at reduced cost. To achieve this, we leveraged non speech-to-speech Standard Yoruba (SY) real-time audios and transcripts in the YORULECT Corpus as well as the corresponding Standard English (SE) transcripts. YORULECT Corpus is small scale(1,504) samples, and it does not have paired English audios. Therefore, we generated the SE audios using pre-trained AI models (i.e. Facebook MMS). We also developed an audio augmentation algorithm named AcoustAug based on three latent acoustic features to generate augmented audios from the raw audios of the two languages. BENYO-S2ST-Corpus-1 has 12,032 audio samples per language, which gives a total of 24,064 sample size. The total audio duration for the two languages is 41.20 hours. This size is quite significant. Beyond building S2ST models, BENYO-S2ST-Corpus-1 can be used to build pretrained models or improve existing ones. The created corpus and Coqui framework were used to build a pretrained Yoruba TTS model (named YoruTTS-0.5) as a proof of concept. The YoruTTS-0.5 gave a F0 RMSE value of 63.54 after 1,000 epochs, which indicates moderate fundamental pitch similarity with the reference real-time audio. Ultimately, the corpus architecture in this study can be leveraged by researchers and developers to curate datasets for multilingual high-resource-to-low-resource African languages. This will bridge the huge digital divides in translations among high and low-resource language pairs. BENYO-S2ST-Corpus-1 and YoruTTS-0.5 are publicly available at (https://bit.ly/40bGMwi).

In this work, we present AfriNLLB, a series of lightweight models for efficient translation from and into African languages. AfriNLLB supports 15 language pairs (30 translation directions), including Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, Amharic, Somali, Zulu, Lingala, Afrikaans, Wolof, and Egyptian Arabic, as well as other African Union official languages such as Arabic (MSA), French, Portuguese, and Spanish. Our training data covers bidirectional translation between English and 13 languages, and between French and two languages (Lingala and Wolof). AfriNLLB models are based on NLLB-200 600M, which we compress using iterative layer pruning and quantization. We fine-tune the pruned models on parallel corpora we curated for African languages, employing knowledge distillation from a larger teacher model. Our work aims at enabling efficient deployment of translation models for African languages in resource-constrained settings. Our evaluation results demonstrate that AfriNLLB models achieve performance comparable to the baseline while being significantly faster. We release two versions of the AfriNLLB models, a Transformers version that allows further fine-tuning and a CTranslate2 version for efficient inference. Moreover, we release all the training data that we used for fine-tuning the baseline and pruned models to facilitate further research.

Sarcasm detection poses a fundamental challenge in computational semantics, requiring models to resolve disparities between literal and intended meaning. The challenge is amplified in low-resource languages where annotated datasets are scarce or nonexistent. We present Yor-Sarc, the first gold-standard dataset for sarcasm detection in Yorùbá, a tonal Niger-Congo language spoken by over 50 million people. The dataset comprises 436 instances annotated by three native speakers from diverse dialectal backgrounds using an annotation protocol specifically designed for Yorùbá sarcasm by taking culture into account. This protocol incorporates context-sensitive interpretation and community-informed guidelines and is accompanied by a comprehensive analysis of inter-annotator agreement to support replication in other African languages. Substantial to almost perfect agreement was achieved (Fleiss' κ= 0.7660; pairwise Cohen's κ= 0.6732--0.8743), with 83.3% unanimous consensus. One annotator pair achieved almost perfect agreement (κ= 0.8743; 93.8% raw agreement), exceeding a number of reported benchmarks for English sarcasm research works. The remaining 16.7% majority-agreement cases are preserved as soft labels for uncertainty-aware modelling. Yor-Sarchttps://github.com/toheebadura/yor-sarc is expected to facilitate research on semantic interpretation and culturally informed NLP for low-resource African languages.

Massively multilingual machine translation (MT) has shown impressive capabilities, including zero and few-shot translation between low-resource language pairs. However, these models are often evaluated on high-resource languages with the assumption that they generalize to low-resource ones. The difficulty of evaluating MT models on low-resource pairs is often due to lack of standardized evaluation datasets. In this paper, we present MENYO-20k, the first multi-domain parallel corpus with a special focus on clean orthography for Yor\`ub\'a--English with standardized train-test splits for benchmarking. We provide several neural MT benchmarks and compare them to the performance of popular pre-trained (massively multilingual) MT models both for the heterogeneous test set and its subdomains. Since these pre-trained models use huge amounts of data with uncertain quality, we also analyze the effect of diacritics, a major characteristic of Yor\`ub\'a, in the training data. We investigate how and when this training condition affects the final quality and intelligibility of a translation. Our models outperform massively multilingual models such as Google (+8.7 BLEU) and Facebook M2M (+9.1 BLEU) when translating to Yor\`ub\'a, setting a high quality benchmark for future research.

Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa with a population of more than 200 million people. More than 500 languages are spoken in Nigeria and it is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world. Despite this, natural language processing (NLP) research has mostly focused on the following four languages: Hausa, Igbo, Nigerian-Pidgin, and Yoruba (i.e <1% of the languages spoken in Nigeria). This is in part due to the unavailability of textual data in these languages to train and apply NLP algorithms. In this work, we introduce ibom -- a dataset for machine translation and topic classification in four Coastal Nigerian languages from the Akwa Ibom State region: Anaang, Efik, Ibibio, and Oro. These languages are not represented in Google Translate or in major benchmarks such as Flores-200 or SIB-200. We focus on extending Flores-200 benchmark to these languages, and further align the translated texts with topic labels based on SIB-200 classification dataset. Our evaluation shows that current LLMs perform poorly on machine translation for these languages in both zero-and-few shot settings. However, we find the few-shot samples to steadily improve topic classification with more shots.

The advancement of speech technologies has been remarkable, yet its integration with African languages remains limited due to the scarcity of African speech corpora. To address this issue, we present AfroDigits, a minimalist, community-driven dataset of spoken digits for African languages, currently covering 38 African languages. As a demonstration of the practical applications of AfroDigits, we conduct audio digit classification experiments on six African languages [Igbo (ibo), Yoruba (yor), Rundi (run), Oshiwambo (kua), Shona (sna), and Oromo (gax)] using the Wav2Vec2.0-Large and XLS-R models. Our experiments reveal a useful insight on the effect of mixing African speech corpora during finetuning. AfroDigits is the first published audio digit dataset for African languages and we believe it will, among other things, pave the way for Afro-centric speech applications such as the recognition of telephone numbers, and street numbers. We release the dataset and platform publicly at https://huggingface.co/datasets/chrisjay/crowd-speech-africa and https://huggingface.co/spaces/chrisjay/afro-speech respectively.

The development of high-performing, robust, and reliable speech technologies depends on large, high-quality datasets. However, African languages -- including our focus, Igbo, Hausa, and Yoruba -- remain under-represented due to insufficient data. Popular voice-enabled technologies do not support any of the 2000+ African languages, limiting accessibility for circa one billion people. While previous dataset efforts exist for the target languages, they lack the scale and diversity needed for robust speech models. To bridge this gap, we introduce the NaijaVoices dataset, a 1,800-hour speech-text dataset with 5,000+ speakers. We outline our unique data collection approach, analyze its acoustic diversity, and demonstrate its impact through finetuning experiments on automatic speech recognition, averagely achieving 75.86% (Whisper), 52.06% (MMS), and 42.33% (XLSR) WER improvements. These results highlight NaijaVoices' potential to advance multilingual speech processing for African languages.

Language is inherent and compulsory for human communication. Whether expressed in a written or spoken way, it ensures understanding between people of the same and different regions. With the growing awareness and effort to include more low-resourced languages in NLP research, African languages have recently been a major subject of research in machine translation, and other text-based areas of NLP. However, there is still very little comparable research in speech recognition for African languages. Interestingly, some of the unique properties of African languages affecting NLP, like their diacritical and tonal complexities, have a major root in their speech, suggesting that careful speech interpretation could provide more intuition on how to deal with the linguistic complexities of African languages for text-based NLP. OkwuGb\'e is a step towards building speech recognition systems for African low-resourced languages. Using Fon and Igbo as our case study, we conduct a comprehensive linguistic analysis of each language and describe the creation of end-to-end, deep neural network-based speech recognition models for both languages. We present a state-of-art ASR model for Fon, as well as benchmark ASR model results for Igbo. Our linguistic analyses (for Fon and Igbo) provide valuable insights and guidance into the creation of speech recognition models for other African low-resourced languages, as well as guide future NLP research for Fon and Igbo. The Fon and Igbo models source code have been made publicly available.

While large language models (LLMs) have shown to perform well on monolingual mathematical and commonsense reasoning, they remain unreliable for multilingual medical reasoning applications, hindering their deployment in multilingual healthcare settings. We address this by first introducing CUREMED-BENCH, a high-quality multilingual medical reasoning dataset with open-ended reasoning queries with a single verifiable answer, spanning thirteen languages, including underrepresented languages such as Amharic, Yoruba, and Swahili. Building on this dataset, we propose CURE-MED, a curriculum-informed reinforcement learning framework that integrates code-switching-aware supervised fine-tuning and Group Relative Policy Optimization to jointly improve logical correctness and language stability. Across thirteen languages, our approach consistently outperforms strong baselines and scales effectively, achieving 85.21% language consistency and 54.35% logical correctness at 7B parameters, and 94.96% language consistency and 70.04% logical correctness at 32B parameters. These results support reliable and equitable multilingual medical reasoning in LLMs. The code and dataset are available at https://cure-med.github.io/

Multilingual benchmarks rarely test reasoning over culturally grounded premises: translated datasets keep English-centric scenarios, while culture-first datasets often lack control over the reasoning required. We propose Macaron, a template-first benchmark that factorizes reasoning type and cultural aspect across question languages. Using 100 language-agnostic templates that cover 7 reasoning types, 22 cultural aspects, native annotators create scenario-aligned English and local-language multiple-choice questions and systematically derived True/False questions. Macaron contains 11,862 instances spanning 20 countries/cultural contexts, 10 scripts, and 20 languages (including low-resource ones like Amharic, Yoruba, Zulu, Kyrgyz, and some Arabic dialects). In zero-shot evaluation of 21 multilingual LLMs, reasoning-mode models achieve the strongest performance and near-parity between English and local languages, while open-weight models degrade substantially in local languages and often approach chance on T/F tasks. Culture-grounded mathematical and counting templates are consistently the hardest. The data can be accessed here https://huggingface.co/datasets/AlaaAhmed2444/Macaron.

BibleTTS is a large, high-quality, open speech dataset for ten languages spoken in Sub-Saharan Africa. The corpus contains up to 86 hours of aligned, studio quality 48kHz single speaker recordings per language, enabling the development of high-quality text-to-speech models. The ten languages represented are: Akuapem Twi, Asante Twi, Chichewa, Ewe, Hausa, Kikuyu, Lingala, Luganda, Luo, and Yoruba. This corpus is a derivative work of Bible recordings made and released by the Open.Bible project from Biblica. We have aligned, cleaned, and filtered the original recordings, and additionally hand-checked a subset of the alignments for each language. We present results for text-to-speech models with Coqui TTS. The data is released under a commercial-friendly CC-BY-SA license.

Indigenous African languages are categorized as under-served in Natural Language Processing. They therefore experience poor digital inclusivity and information access. The processing challenge with such languages has been how to use machine learning and deep learning models without the requisite data. The Kencorpus project intends to bridge this gap by collecting and storing text and speech data that is good enough for data-driven solutions in applications such as machine translation, question answering and transcription in multilingual communities. The Kencorpus dataset is a text and speech corpus for three languages predominantly spoken in Kenya: Swahili, Dholuo and Luhya. Data collection was done by researchers from communities, schools, media, and publishers. The Kencorpus' dataset has a collection of 5,594 items - 4,442 texts (5.6M words) and 1,152 speech files (177hrs). Based on this data, Part of Speech tagging sets for Dholuo and Luhya (50,000 and 93,000 words respectively) were developed. We developed 7,537 Question-Answer pairs for Swahili and created a text translation set of 13,400 sentences from Dholuo and Luhya into Swahili. The datasets are useful for downstream machine learning tasks such as model training and translation. We also developed two proof of concept systems: for Kiswahili speech-to-text and machine learning system for Question Answering task, with results of 18.87% word error rate and 80% Exact Match (EM) respectively. These initial results give great promise to the usability of Kencorpus to the machine learning community. Kencorpus is one of few public domain corpora for these three low resource languages and forms a basis of learning and sharing experiences for similar works especially for low resource languages.

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 low-resource languages are included, their data is often noisy, and lack of labeled datasets makes it hard to evaluate performance outside high-resource languages like English. In this dissertation, we focus on languages spoken in Sub-Saharan Africa where all the indigenous languages in this region can be regarded as low-resourced in terms of the availability of labelled data for NLP tasks and unlabelled data found on the web. We analyse the noise in the publicly available corpora, and curate a high-quality corpus, demonstrating that the quality of semantic representations learned in word embeddings does not only depend on the amount of data but on the quality of pre-training data. We demonstrate empirically the limitations of word embeddings, and the opportunities the multilingual pre-trained language model (PLM) offers especially for languages unseen during pre-training and low-resource scenarios. We further study how to adapt and specialize multilingual PLMs to unseen African languages using a small amount of monolingual texts. To address the under-representation of the African languages in NLP research, we developed large scale human-annotated labelled datasets for 21 African languages in two impactful NLP tasks: named entity recognition and machine translation. We conduct an extensive empirical evaluation using state-of-the-art methods across supervised, weakly-supervised, and transfer learning settings.

Over 800 languages are spoken across West Africa. Despite the obvious diversity among people who speak these languages, one language significantly unifies them all - West African Pidgin English. There are at least 80 million speakers of West African Pidgin English. However, there is no known natural language processing (NLP) work on this language. In this work, we perform the first NLP work on the most popular variant of the language, providing three major contributions. First, the provision of a Pidgin corpus of over 56000 sentences, which is the largest we know of. Secondly, the training of the first ever cross-lingual embedding between Pidgin and English. This aligned embedding will be helpful in the performance of various downstream tasks between English and Pidgin. Thirdly, the training of an Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation model between Pidgin and English which achieves BLEU scores of 7.93 from Pidgin to English, and 5.18 from English to Pidgin. In all, this work greatly reduces the barrier of entry for future NLP works on West African Pidgin English.

Transformer-based language models have been changing the modern Natural Language Processing (NLP) landscape for high-resource languages such as English, Chinese, Russian, etc. However, this technology does not yet exist for any Ghanaian language. In this paper, we introduce the first of such models for Twi or Akan, the most widely spoken Ghanaian language. The specific contribution of this research work is the development of several pretrained transformer language models for the Akuapem and Asante dialects of Twi, paving the way for advances in application areas such as Named Entity Recognition (NER), Neural Machine Translation (NMT), Sentiment Analysis (SA) and Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging. Specifically, we introduce four different flavours of ABENA -- A BERT model Now in Akan that is fine-tuned on a set of Akan corpora, and BAKO - BERT with Akan Knowledge only, which is trained from scratch. We open-source the model through the Hugging Face model hub and demonstrate its use via a simple sentiment classification example.

Africa has over 2000 languages. Despite this, African languages account for a small portion of available resources and publications in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This is due to multiple factors, including: a lack of focus from government and funding, discoverability, a lack of community, sheer language complexity, difficulty in reproducing papers and no benchmarks to compare techniques. To begin to address the identified problems, MASAKHANE, an open-source, continent-wide, distributed, online research effort for machine translation for African languages, was founded. In this paper, we discuss our methodology for building the community and spurring research from the African continent, as well as outline the success of the community in terms of addressing the identified problems affecting African NLP.

Multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) acquire valuable, generalizable linguistic information during pretraining and have advanced the state of the art on task-specific finetuning. To date, only ~31 out of ~2,000 African languages are covered in existing language models. We ameliorate this limitation by developing SERENGETI, a massively multilingual language model that covers 517 African languages and language varieties. We evaluate our novel models on eight natural language understanding tasks across 20 datasets, comparing to 4 mPLMs that cover 4-23 African languages. SERENGETI outperforms other models on 11 datasets across the eights tasks, achieving 82.27 average F_1. We also perform analyses of errors from our models, which allows us to investigate the influence of language genealogy and linguistic similarity when the models are applied under zero-shot settings. We will publicly release our models for research.\href{https://github.com/UBC-NLP/serengeti{https://github.com/UBC-NLP/serengeti}}

Recent progress in text classification has been focused on high-resource languages such as English and Chinese. For low-resource languages, amongst them most African languages, the lack of well-annotated data and effective preprocessing, is hindering the progress and the transfer of successful methods. In this paper, we introduce two news datasets (KINNEWS and KIRNEWS) for multi-class classification of news articles in Kinyarwanda and Kirundi, two low-resource African languages. The two languages are mutually intelligible, but while Kinyarwanda has been studied in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to some extent, this work constitutes the first study on Kirundi. Along with the datasets, we provide statistics, guidelines for preprocessing, and monolingual and cross-lingual baseline models. Our experiments show that training embeddings on the relatively higher-resourced Kinyarwanda yields successful cross-lingual transfer to Kirundi. In addition, the design of the created datasets allows for a wider use in NLP beyond text classification in future studies, such as representation learning, cross-lingual learning with more distant languages, or as base for new annotations for tasks such as parsing, POS tagging, and NER. The datasets, stopwords, and pre-trained embeddings are publicly available at https://github.com/Andrews2017/KINNEWS-and-KIRNEWS-Corpus .

Africa is home to over 2000 languages from over six language families and has the highest linguistic diversity among all continents. This includes 75 languages with at least one million speakers each. Yet, there is little NLP research conducted on African languages. Crucial in enabling such research is the availability of high-quality annotated datasets. In this paper, we introduce AfriSenti, which consists of 14 sentiment datasets of 110,000+ tweets in 14 African languages (Amharic, Algerian Arabic, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Moroccan Arabic, Mozambican Portuguese, Nigerian Pidgin, Oromo, Swahili, Tigrinya, Twi, Xitsonga, and Yor\`ub\'a) from four language families annotated by native speakers. The data is used in SemEval 2023 Task 12, the first Afro-centric SemEval shared task. We describe the data collection methodology, annotation process, and related challenges when curating each of the datasets. We conduct experiments with different sentiment classification baselines and discuss their usefulness. We hope AfriSenti enables new work on under-represented languages. The dataset is available at https://github.com/afrisenti-semeval/afrisent-semeval-2023 and can also be loaded as a huggingface datasets (https://huggingface.co/datasets/shmuhammad/AfriSenti).

Creating speech datasets, models, and evaluation frameworks for low-resource languages remains challenging given the lack of a broad base of pertinent experience to draw from. This paper reports on the field collection of 612 hours of spontaneous speech in Bambara, a low-resource West African language; the semi-automated annotation of that dataset with transcriptions; the creation of several monolingual ultra-compact and small models using the dataset; and the automatic and human evaluation of their output. We offer practical suggestions for data collection protocols, annotation, and model design, as well as evidence for the importance of performing human evaluation. In addition to the main dataset, multiple evaluation datasets, models, and code are made publicly available.

We take a step towards addressing the under-representation of the African continent in NLP research by creating the first large publicly available high-quality dataset for named entity recognition (NER) in ten African languages, bringing together a variety of stakeholders. We detail characteristics of the languages to help researchers understand the challenges that these languages pose for NER. We analyze our datasets and conduct an extensive empirical evaluation of state-of-the-art methods across both supervised and transfer learning settings. We release the data, code, and models in order to inspire future research on African NLP.

Despite representing nearly one-third of the world's languages, African languages remain critically underserved by modern NLP technologies, with 88\% classified as severely underrepresented or completely ignored in computational linguistics. We present the African Languages Lab (All Lab), a comprehensive research initiative that addresses this technological gap through systematic data collection, model development, and capacity building. Our contributions include: (1) a quality-controlled data collection pipeline, yielding the largest validated African multi-modal speech and text dataset spanning 40 languages with 19 billion tokens of monolingual text and 12,628 hours of aligned speech data; (2) extensive experimental validation demonstrating that our dataset, combined with fine-tuning, achieves substantial improvements over baseline models, averaging +23.69 ChrF++, +0.33 COMET, and +15.34 BLEU points across 31 evaluated languages; and (3) a structured research program that has successfully mentored fifteen early-career researchers, establishing sustainable local capacity. Our comparative evaluation against Google Translate reveals competitive performance in several languages while identifying areas that require continued development.

African languages are spoken by over a billion people, but are underrepresented in NLP research and development. The challenges impeding progress include the limited availability of annotated datasets, as well as a lack of understanding of the settings where current methods are effective. In this paper, we make progress towards solutions for these challenges, focusing on the task of named entity recognition (NER). We create the largest human-annotated NER dataset for 20 African languages, and we study the behavior of state-of-the-art cross-lingual transfer methods in an Africa-centric setting, demonstrating that the choice of source language significantly affects performance. We show that choosing the best transfer language improves zero-shot F1 scores by an average of 14 points across 20 languages compared to using English. Our results highlight the need for benchmark datasets and models that cover typologically-diverse African languages.

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 in their infancy, several possibilities exist to address this critical lack of data. Among them is Transfer Learning, which allows low-resource languages to benefit from the good representation of other languages that are similar to them. In this work, we adopt a similar approach, aiming to pioneer NLP technologies for Comorian, a group of four languages or dialects belonging to the Bantu family. Our approach is initially motivated by the hypothesis that if a human can understand a different language from their native language with little or no effort, it would be entirely possible to model this process on a machine. To achieve this, we consider ways to construct Comorian datasets mixed with Swahili. One thing to note here is that in terms of Swahili data, we only focus on elements that are closest to Comorian by calculating lexical distances between candidate and source data. We empirically test this hypothesis in two use cases: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Machine Translation (MT). Our MT model achieved ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, and ROUGE-L scores of 0.6826, 0.42, and 0.6532, respectively, while our ASR system recorded a WER of 39.50\% and a CER of 13.76\%. This research is crucial for advancing NLP in underrepresented languages, with potential to preserve and promote Comorian linguistic heritage in the digital age.

Machine translation (MT) is a rapidly expanding field that has experienced significant advancements in recent years with the development of models capable of translating multiple languages with remarkable accuracy. However, the representation of African languages in this field still needs to improve due to linguistic complexities and limited resources. This applies to the Zarma language, a dialect of Songhay (of the Nilo-Saharan language family) spoken by over 5 million people across Niger and neighboring countries lewis2016ethnologue. This paper introduces Feriji, the first robust French-Zarma parallel corpus and glossary designed for MT. The corpus, containing 61,085 sentences in Zarma and 42,789 in French, and a glossary of 4,062 words represent a significant step in addressing the need for more resources for Zarma. We fine-tune three large language models on our dataset, obtaining a BLEU score of 30.06 on the best-performing model. We further evaluate the models on human judgments of fluency, comprehension, and readability and the importance and impact of the corpus and models. Our contributions help to bridge a significant language gap and promote an essential and overlooked indigenous African language.

Low-resource African languages pose unique challenges for natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including natural language generation (NLG). In this paper, we develop Cheetah, a massively multilingual NLG language model for African languages. Cheetah supports 517 African languages and language varieties, allowing us to address the scarcity of NLG resources and provide a solution to foster linguistic diversity. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Cheetah through comprehensive evaluations across seven generation downstream tasks. In five of the seven tasks, Cheetah significantly outperforms other models, showcasing its remarkable performance for generating coherent and contextually appropriate text in a wide range of African languages. We additionally conduct a detailed human evaluation to delve deeper into the linguistic capabilities of Cheetah. The introduction of Cheetah has far-reaching benefits for linguistic diversity. By leveraging pretrained models and adapting them to specific languages, our approach facilitates the development of practical NLG applications for African communities. The findings of this study contribute to advancing NLP research in low-resource settings, enabling greater accessibility and inclusion for African languages in a rapidly expanding digital landscape. We will publicly release our models for research.

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 high-quality dialogue datasets for 6 African languages: Swahili, Wolof, Hausa, Nigerian Pidgin English, Kinyarwanda & Yor\`ub\'a. These datasets consist of 1,500 turns each, which we translate from a portion of the English multi-domain MultiWOZ dataset. Subsequently, we investigate & analyze the effectiveness of modelling through transfer learning by utilziing state-of-the-art (SoTA) deep monolingual models: DialoGPT and BlenderBot. We compare the models with a simple seq2seq baseline using perplexity. Besides this, we conduct human evaluation of single-turn conversations by using majority votes and measure inter-annotator agreement (IAA). We find that the hypothesis that deep monolingual models learn some abstractions that generalize across languages holds. We observe human-like conversations, to different degrees, in 5 out of the 6 languages. The language with the most transferable properties is the Nigerian Pidgin English, with a human-likeness score of 78.1%, of which 34.4% are unanimous. We freely provide the datasets and host the model checkpoints/demos on the HuggingFace hub for public access.

Currently, there is no usable machine translation system for Nko, a language spoken by tens of millions of people across multiple West African countries, which holds significant cultural and educational value. To address this issue, we present a set of tools, resources, and baseline results aimed towards the development of usable machine translation systems for Nko and other languages that do not currently have sufficiently large parallel text corpora available. (1) Friaparallelel: A novel collaborative parallel text curation software that incorporates quality control through copyedit-based workflows. (2) Expansion of the FLoRes-200 and NLLB-Seed corpora with 2,009 and 6,193 high-quality Nko translations in parallel with 204 and 40 other languages. (3) nicolingua-0005: A collection of trilingual and bilingual corpora with 130,850 parallel segments and monolingual corpora containing over 3 million Nko words. (4) Baseline bilingual and multilingual neural machine translation results with the best model scoring 30.83 English-Nko chrF++ on FLoRes-devtest.

Evaluating machine translation (MT) quality for under-resourced African languages remains a significant challenge, as existing metrics often suffer from limited language coverage and poor performance in low-resource settings. While recent efforts, such as AfriCOMET, have addressed some of the issues, they are still constrained by small evaluation sets, a lack of publicly available training data tailored to African languages, and inconsistent performance in extremely low-resource scenarios. In this work, we introduce SSA-MTE, a large-scale human-annotated MT evaluation (MTE) dataset covering 13 African language pairs from the News domain, with over 63,000 sentence-level annotations from a diverse set of MT systems. Based on this data, we develop SSA-COMET and SSA-COMET-QE, improved reference-based and reference-free evaluation metrics. We also benchmark prompting-based approaches using state-of-the-art LLMs like GPT-4o and Claude. Our experimental results show that SSA-COMET models significantly outperform AfriCOMET and are competitive with the strongest LLM (Gemini 2.5 Pro) evaluated in our study, particularly on low-resource languages such as Twi, Luo, and Yoruba. All resources are released under open licenses to support future research.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance across various tasks, yet significant disparities remain for non-English languages, and especially native African languages. This paper addresses these disparities by creating approximately 1 million human-translated words of new benchmark data in 8 low-resource African languages, covering a population of over 160 million speakers of: Amharic, Bambara, Igbo, Sepedi (Northern Sotho), Shona, Sesotho (Southern Sotho), Setswana, and Tsonga. Our benchmarks are translations of Winogrande and three sections of MMLU: college medicine, clinical knowledge, and virology. Using the translated benchmarks, we report previously unknown performance gaps between state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs in English and African languages. Finally, using results from over 400 fine-tuned models, we explore several methods to reduce the LLM performance gap, including high-quality dataset fine-tuning (using an LLM-as-an-Annotator), cross-lingual transfer, and cultural appropriateness adjustments. Key findings include average mono-lingual improvements of 5.6% with fine-tuning (with 5.4% average mono-lingual improvements when using high-quality data over low-quality data), 2.9% average gains from cross-lingual transfer, and a 3.0% out-of-the-box performance boost on culturally appropriate questions. The publicly available benchmarks, translations, and code from this study support further research and development aimed at creating more inclusive and effective language technologies.

Text embeddings are an essential building component of several NLP tasks such as retrieval-augmented generation which is crucial for preventing hallucinations in LLMs. Despite the recent release of massively multilingual MTEB (MMTEB), African languages remain underrepresented, with existing tasks often repurposed from translation benchmarks such as FLORES clustering or SIB-200. In this paper, we introduce AfriMTEB -- a regional expansion of MMTEB covering 59 languages, 14 tasks, and 38 datasets, including six newly added datasets. Unlike many MMTEB datasets that include fewer than five languages, the new additions span 14 to 56 African languages and introduce entirely new tasks, such as hate speech detection, intent detection, and emotion classification, which were not previously covered. Complementing this, we present AfriE5, an adaptation of the instruction-tuned mE5 model to African languages through cross-lingual contrastive distillation. Our evaluation shows that AfriE5 achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong baselines such as Gemini-Embeddings and mE5.

Africa's rich linguistic heritage remains underrepresented in NLP, largely due to historical policies that favor foreign languages and create significant data inequities. In this paper, we integrate theoretical insights on Africa's language landscape with an empirical evaluation using Sahara - a comprehensive benchmark curated from large-scale, publicly accessible datasets capturing the continent's linguistic diversity. By systematically assessing the performance of leading large language models (LLMs) on Sahara, we demonstrate how policy-induced data variations directly impact model effectiveness across African languages. Our findings reveal that while a few languages perform reasonably well, many Indigenous languages remain marginalized due to sparse data. Leveraging these insights, we offer actionable recommendations for policy reforms and inclusive data practices. Overall, our work underscores the urgent need for a dual approach - combining theoretical understanding with empirical evaluation - to foster linguistic diversity in AI for African communities.

In this paper, we present MasakhaPOS, the largest part-of-speech (POS) dataset for 20 typologically diverse African languages. We discuss the challenges in annotating POS for these languages using the UD (universal dependencies) guidelines. We conducted extensive POS baseline experiments using conditional random field and several multilingual pre-trained language models. We applied various cross-lingual transfer models trained with data available in UD. Evaluating on the MasakhaPOS dataset, we show that choosing the best transfer language(s) in both single-source and multi-source setups greatly improves the POS tagging performance of the target languages, in particular when combined with cross-lingual parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods. Crucially, transferring knowledge from a language that matches the language family and morphosyntactic properties seems more effective for POS tagging in unseen languages.

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 from 12 countries. The benchmark offers parallel English-African language Q&A pairs across text and speech modalities and was entirely created by native speakers. Benchmarking large language models (LLMs) on Afri-MCQA shows that open-weight models perform poorly across evaluated cultures, with near-zero accuracy on open-ended VQA when queried in native language or speech. To evaluate linguistic competence, we include control experiments meant to assess this specific aspect separate from cultural knowledge, and we observe significant performance gaps between native languages and English for both text and speech. These findings underscore the need for speech-first approaches, culturally grounded pretraining, and cross-lingual cultural transfer. To support more inclusive multimodal AI development in African languages, we release our Afri-MCQA under academic license or CC BY-NC 4.0 on HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/datasets/Atnafu/Afri-MCQA)

We present Ethio-ASR, a suite of multilingual CTC-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) models jointly trained on five Ethiopian languages: Amharic, Tigrinya, Oromo, Sidaama, and Wolaytta. These languages belong to the Semitic, Cushitic, and Omotic branches of the Afroasiatic family, and remain severely underrepresented in speech technology despite being spoken by the vast majority of Ethiopia's population. We train our models on the recently released WAXAL corpus using several pre-trained speech encoders and evaluate against strong multilingual baselines, including OmniASR. Our best model achieves an average WER of 30.48% on the WAXAL test set, outperforming the best OmniASR model with substantially fewer parameters. We further provide a comprehensive analysis of gender bias, the contribution of vowel length and consonant gemination to ASR errors, and the training dynamics of multilingual CTC models. Our models and codebase are publicly available to the research community.

Ethiopic/Amharic script is one of the oldest African writing systems, which serves at least 23 languages (e.g., Amharic, Tigrinya) in East Africa for more than 120 million people. The Amharic writing system, Abugida, has 282 syllables, 15 punctuation marks, and 20 numerals. The Amharic syllabic matrix is derived from 34 base graphemes/consonants by adding up to 12 appropriate diacritics or vocalic markers to the characters. The syllables with a common consonant or vocalic markers are likely to be visually similar and challenge text recognition tasks. In this work, we presented the first comprehensive public datasets named HUST-ART, HUST-AST, ABE, and Tana for Amharic script detection and recognition in the natural scene. We have also conducted extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of the state of art methods in detecting and recognizing Amharic scene text on our datasets. The evaluation results demonstrate the robustness of our datasets for benchmarking and its potential of promoting the development of robust Amharic script detection and recognition algorithms. Consequently, the outcome will benefit people in East Africa, including diplomats from several countries and international communities.

The prevalence of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems in spoken language applications has increased significantly in recent years. Notably, many African languages lack sufficient linguistic resources to support the robustness of these systems. This paper focuses on the development of an end-to-end speech recognition system customized for Nigerian Pidgin English. We investigated and evaluated different pretrained state-of-the-art architectures on a new dataset. Our empirical results demonstrate a notable performance of the variant Wav2Vec2 XLSR-53 on our dataset, achieving a word error rate (WER) of 29.6% on the test set, surpassing other architectures such as NEMO QUARTZNET and Wav2Vec2.0 BASE-100H in quantitative assessments. Additionally, we demonstrate that pretrained state-of-the-art architectures do not work well out-of-the-box. We performed zero-shot evaluation using XLSR-English as the baseline, chosen for its similarity to Nigerian Pidgin. This yielded a higher WER of 73.7%. By adapting this architecture to nuances represented in our dataset, we reduce error by 59.84%. Our dataset comprises 4,288 recorded utterances from 10 native speakers, partitioned into training, validation, and test sets. This study underscores the potential for improving ASR systems for under-resourced languages like Nigerian Pidgin English, contributing to greater inclusion in speech technology applications. We publicly release our unique parallel dataset (speech-to-text) on Nigerian Pidgin, as well as the model weights on Hugging Face. Our code would be made available to foster future research from the community.

Figurative language permeates human communication, but at the same time is relatively understudied in NLP. Datasets have been created in English to accelerate progress towards measuring and improving figurative language processing in language models (LMs). However, the use of figurative language is an expression of our cultural and societal experiences, making it difficult for these phrases to be universally applicable. In this work, we create a figurative language inference dataset, \datasetname, for seven diverse languages associated with a variety of cultures: Hindi, Indonesian, Javanese, Kannada, Sundanese, Swahili and Yoruba. Our dataset reveals that each language relies on cultural and regional concepts for figurative expressions, with the highest overlap between languages originating from the same region. We assess multilingual LMs' abilities to interpret figurative language in zero-shot and few-shot settings. All languages exhibit a significant deficiency compared to English, with variations in performance reflecting the availability of pre-training and fine-tuning data, emphasizing the need for LMs to be exposed to a broader range of linguistic and cultural variation during training.

As part of the Open Language Data Initiative shared tasks, we have expanded the FLORES+ evaluation set to include Emakhuwa, a low-resource language widely spoken in Mozambique. We translated the dev and devtest sets from Portuguese into Emakhuwa, and we detail the translation process and quality assurance measures used. Our methodology involved various quality checks, including post-editing and adequacy assessments. The resulting datasets consist of multiple reference sentences for each source. We present baseline results from training a Neural Machine Translation system and fine-tuning existing multilingual translation models. Our findings suggest that spelling inconsistencies remain a challenge in Emakhuwa. Additionally, the baseline models underperformed on this evaluation set, underscoring the necessity for further research to enhance machine translation quality for Emakhuwa. The data is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/LIACC/Emakhuwa-FLORES.

The Igbo language is facing a risk of becoming endangered, as indicated by a 2025 UNESCO study. This highlights the need to develop language technologies for Igbo to foster communication, learning and preservation. To create robust, impactful, and widely adopted language technologies for Igbo, it is essential to incorporate the multi-dialectal nature of the language. The primary obstacle in achieving dialectal-aware language technologies is the lack of comprehensive dialectal datasets. In response, we present the IgboAPI dataset, a multi-dialectal Igbo-English dictionary dataset, developed with the aim of enhancing the representation of Igbo dialects. Furthermore, we illustrate the practicality of the IgboAPI dataset through two distinct studies: one focusing on Igbo semantic lexicon and the other on machine translation. In the semantic lexicon project, we successfully establish an initial Igbo semantic lexicon for the Igbo semantic tagger, while in the machine translation study, we demonstrate that by finetuning existing machine translation systems using the IgboAPI dataset, we significantly improve their ability to handle dialectal variations in sentences.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results in a wide range of natural language applications. However, they often struggle to recognize low-resource languages, in particular African languages, which are not well represented in large training corpora. In this paper, we consider how to adapt LLMs to low-resource African languages. We find that combining curated data from African languages with high-quality English educational texts results in a training mix that substantially improves the model's performance on these languages. On the challenging IrokoBench dataset, our models consistently achieve the best performance amongst similarly sized baselines, particularly on knowledge-intensive multiple-choice questions (AfriMMLU). Additionally, on the cross-lingual question answering benchmark AfriQA, our models outperform the base model by over 10%. To better understand the role of English data during training, we translate a subset of 200M tokens into Swahili language and perform an analysis which reveals that the content of these data is primarily responsible for the strong performance. We release our models and data to encourage future research on African languages.

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 (West/Central Africa). The dataset contains over 601,000 approved sentence-level text annotations and over 385,000 audio recordings across nine languages, collected through a dedicated community data collection platform involving over 100 contributors. The Thiomi platform collected data for nine languages; Swahili data was supplemented with existing Common Voice recordings. A multi-tier quality assurance pipeline achieves 86-100% text approval rates for the six primary languages. To validate the dataset's utility, we train and evaluate ASR, MT, and TTS models, establishing baselines across all ten languages. Our best ASR system achieves 3.24% WER on Swahili (Common Voice), reducing prior academic SOTA from 8.3% to 3.24% (5.1 percentage point absolute, 61% relative reduction), and 4.3% WER on Somali. The dataset will be published on HuggingFace. We describe the collection platform, quality assurance workflows, and baseline experiments, and discuss implications for African language technology infrastructure.

In this work, we present AfriHuBERT, an extension of mHuBERT-147, a state-of-the-art (SOTA) and compact self-supervised learning (SSL) model, originally pretrained on 147 languages. While mHuBERT-147 was pretrained on 16 African languages, we expand this to cover 39 African languages through continued pretraining on 6,500+ hours of speech data aggregated from diverse sources, including 23 newly added languages. We evaluate AfriHuBERT on two key speech tasks: Language Identification (LID) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) using FLEURS dataset. Our results show a +4% F1 score improvement on average for LID and a -1.2% average Word Error Rate (WER) reduction for ASR. Further analysis shows that ASR models trained on AfriHuBERT exhibit improved cross-corpus generalization. Additionally, the analysis indicates that the FLEURS have data quality limitations that may affect their suitability for evaluating low-resource African languages, suggesting the need for better evaluation benchmarks for these languages.

Large language models (LLMs) have gained popularity recently due to their outstanding performance in various downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, low-resource languages are still lagging behind current state-of-the-art (SOTA) developments in the field of NLP due to insufficient resources to train LLMs. Ethiopian languages exhibit remarkable linguistic diversity, encompassing a wide array of scripts, and are imbued with profound religious and cultural significance. This paper introduces EthioLLM -- multilingual large language models for five Ethiopian languages (Amharic, Ge'ez, Afan Oromo, Somali, and Tigrinya) and English, and Ethiobenchmark -- a new benchmark dataset for various downstream NLP tasks. We evaluate the performance of these models across five downstream NLP tasks. We open-source our multilingual language models, new benchmark datasets for various downstream tasks, and task-specific fine-tuned language models and discuss the performance of the models. Our dataset and models are available at the https://huggingface.co/EthioNLP repository.

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 (e.g. African languages) are often evaluated only on basic text classification tasks due to the lack of appropriate or comprehensive benchmarks outside of high-resource languages. In this paper, we introduce IrokoBench -- a human-translated benchmark dataset for 16 typologically-diverse low-resource African languages covering three tasks: natural language inference~(AfriXNLI), mathematical reasoning~(AfriMGSM), and multi-choice knowledge-based QA~(AfriMMLU). We use IrokoBench to evaluate zero-shot, few-shot, and translate-test settings~(where test sets are translated into English) across 10 open and four proprietary LLMs. Our evaluation reveals a significant performance gap between high-resource languages~(such as English and French) and low-resource African languages. We observe a significant performance gap between open and proprietary models, with the highest performing open model, Aya-101 only at 58\% of the best-performing proprietary model GPT-4o performance. Machine translating the test set to English before evaluation helped to close the gap for larger models that are English-centric, like LLaMa 3 70B. These findings suggest that more efforts are needed to develop and adapt LLMs for African languages.

Large language models (LLMs) have received a lot of attention in natural language processing (NLP) research because of their exceptional performance in understanding and generating human languages. However, low-resource languages are left behind due to the unavailability of resources. In this work, we focus on enhancing the LLaMA-2-Amharic model by integrating task-specific and generative datasets to improve language model performance for Amharic. We compile an Amharic instruction fine-tuning dataset and fine-tuned LLaMA-2-Amharic model. The fine-tuned model shows promising results in different NLP tasks. We open-source our dataset creation pipeline, instruction datasets, trained models, and evaluation outputs to promote language-specific studies on these models.

In this paper we present two datasets for Tamasheq, a developing language mainly spoken in Mali and Niger. These two datasets were made available for the IWSLT 2022 low-resource speech translation track, and they consist of collections of radio recordings from daily broadcast news in Niger (Studio Kalangou) and Mali (Studio Tamani). We share (i) a massive amount of unlabeled audio data (671 hours) in five languages: French from Niger, Fulfulde, Hausa, Tamasheq and Zarma, and (ii) a smaller 17 hours parallel corpus of audio recordings in Tamasheq, with utterance-level translations in the French language. All this data is shared under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. We hope these resources will inspire the speech community to develop and benchmark models using the Tamasheq language.

In Africa, and the world at large, there is an increasing focus on developing Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems to overcome language barriers. NMT for Low-resource language is particularly compelling as it involves learning with limited labelled data. However, obtaining a well-aligned parallel corpus for low-resource languages can be challenging. The disparity between the technological advancement of a few global languages and the lack of research on NMT for local languages in Chad is striking. End-to-end NMT trials on low-resource Chad languages have not been attempted. Additionally, there is a dearth of online and well-structured data gathering for research in Natural Language Processing, unlike some African languages. However, a guided approach for data gathering can produce bitext data for many Chadian language translation pairs with well-known languages that have ample data. In this project, we created the first sba-Fr Dataset, which is a corpus of Ngambay-to-French translations, and fine-tuned three pre-trained models using this dataset. Our experiments show that the M2M100 model outperforms other models with high BLEU scores on both original and original+synthetic data. The publicly available bitext dataset can be used for research purposes.

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 -- a new benchmark that focuses on two tasks in six typologically-diverse African languages, created via human translation of existing English benchmarks. The first dataset, Uhura-ARC-Easy, is composed of multiple-choice science questions. The second, Uhura-TruthfulQA, is a safety benchmark testing the truthfulness of models on topics including health, law, finance, and politics. We highlight the challenges creating benchmarks with highly technical content for LRLs and outline mitigation strategies. Our evaluation reveals a significant performance gap between proprietary models such as GPT-4o and o1-preview, and Claude models, and open-source models like Meta's LLaMA and Google's Gemma. Additionally, all models perform better in English than in African languages. These results indicate that LMs struggle with answering scientific questions and are more prone to generating false claims in low-resource African languages. Our findings underscore the necessity for continuous improvement of multilingual LM capabilities in LRL settings to ensure safe and reliable use in real-world contexts. We open-source the Uhura Benchmark and Uhura Platform to foster further research and development in NLP for LRLs.

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has allowed them to be proficient in various tasks, including content generation. However, their unregulated usage can lead to malicious activities such as plagiarism and generating and spreading fake news, especially for low-resource languages. Most existing machine-generated text detectors are trained on high-resource languages like English, French, etc. In this study, we developed the first large-scale detector that can distinguish between human- and machine-generated content in Hausa. We scrapped seven Hausa-language media outlets for the human-generated text and the Gemini-2.0 flash model to automatically generate the corresponding Hausa-language articles based on the human-generated article headlines. We fine-tuned four pre-trained Afri-centric models (AfriTeVa, AfriBERTa, AfroXLMR, and AfroXLMR-76L) on the resulting dataset and assessed their performance using accuracy and F1-score metrics. AfroXLMR achieved the highest performance with an accuracy of 99.23% and an F1 score of 99.21%, demonstrating its effectiveness for Hausa text detection. Our dataset is made publicly available to enable further research.

The Fon language, spoken by an average 2 million of people, is a truly low-resourced African language, with a limited online presence, and existing datasets (just to name but a few). Multitask learning is a learning paradigm that aims to improve the generalization capacity of a model by sharing knowledge across different but related tasks: this could be prevalent in very data-scarce scenarios. In this paper, we present the first explorative approach to multitask learning, for model capabilities enhancement in Natural Language Processing for the Fon language. Specifically, we explore the tasks of Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Part of Speech Tagging (POS) for Fon. We leverage two language model heads as encoders to build shared representations for the inputs, and we use linear layers blocks for classification relative to each task. Our results on the NER and POS tasks for Fon, show competitive (or better) performances compared to several multilingual pretrained language models finetuned on single tasks. Additionally, we perform a few ablation studies to leverage the efficiency of two different loss combination strategies and find out that the equal loss weighting approach works best in our case. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/bonaventuredossou/multitask_fon.

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 hours of spontaneous speech, collected from 4,777 native speakers across diverse regions and demographics. This work addresses the critical underrepresentation of African languages in speech technology by providing a high-quality, linguistically diverse resource. Data collection followed a dual methodology: scripted recordings drew from compiled text corpora, translations, and domain-specific generated sentences spanning eleven domains relevant to the Kenyan context, while unscripted speech was elicited through textual and image prompts to capture natural linguistic variation and dialectal nuances. A customized mobile application enabled contributors to record using smartphones. Quality assurance operated at multiple layers, encompassing automated signal-to-noise ratio validation prior to recording and human review for content accuracy. Though the project encountered challenges common to low-resource settings, including unreliable infrastructure, device compatibility issues, and community trust barriers, these were mitigated through local mobilizers, stakeholder partnerships, and adaptive training protocols. AfriVoices-KE provides a foundational resource for developing inclusive automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech systems, while advancing the digital preservation of Kenya's linguistic heritage.

We present Afro-MNIST, a set of synthetic MNIST-style datasets for four orthographies used in Afro-Asiatic and Niger-Congo languages: Ge`ez (Ethiopic), Vai, Osmanya, and N'Ko. These datasets serve as "drop-in" replacements for MNIST. We also describe and open-source a method for synthetic MNIST-style dataset generation from single examples of each digit. These datasets can be found at https://github.com/Daniel-Wu/AfroMNIST. We hope that MNIST-style datasets will be developed for other numeral systems, and that these datasets vitalize machine learning education in underrepresented nations in the research community.

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 Afrikaans, Swahili, and Zulu, the translation model is specifically developed for Lingala, an under-resourced African language, building upon the pretraining approach introduced by Reid and Artetxe (2021), originally designed for high-resource languages. Through a series of comprehensive experiments, we explore different pretraining methodologies, including the integration of multiple languages and the use of both monolingual and parallel data during the pretraining phase. Our findings indicate that pretraining on multiple languages and leveraging both monolingual and parallel data significantly enhance translation quality. This study offers valuable insights into effective pretraining strategies for low-resource machine translation, helping to bridge the performance gap between high-resource and low-resource languages. The results contribute to the broader goal of developing more inclusive and accurate NLP models for marginalized communities and underrepresented populations. The code and datasets used in this study are publicly available to facilitate further research and ensure reproducibility, with the exception of certain data that may no longer be accessible due to changes in public availability.

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. Without foundational digital resources for African languages, which are considered low-resource in the digital context, these advanced tools remain out of reach. This work details the AI4D - African Language Program, a 3-part project that 1) incentivised the crowd-sourcing, collection and curation of language datasets through an online quantitative and qualitative challenge, 2) supported research fellows for a period of 3-4 months to create datasets annotated for NLP tasks, and 3) hosted competitive Machine Learning challenges on the basis of these datasets. Key outcomes of the work so far include 1) the creation of 9+ open source, African language datasets annotated for a variety of ML tasks, and 2) the creation of baseline models for these datasets through hosting of competitive ML challenges.

Question Answering (QA) returns concise answers or answer lists from natural language text given a context document. Many resources go into curating QA datasets to advance robust models' development. There is a surge of QA datasets for languages like English, however, this is not true for Amharic. Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia, is the second most spoken Semitic language in the world. There is no published or publicly available Amharic QA dataset. Hence, to foster the research in Amharic QA, we present the first Amharic QA (AmQA) dataset. We crowdsourced 2628 question-answer pairs over 378 Wikipedia articles. Additionally, we run an XLMR Large-based baseline model to spark open-domain QA research interest. The best-performing baseline achieves an F-score of 69.58 and 71.74 in reader-retriever QA and reading comprehension settings respectively.

Hate speech and abusive language are global phenomena that need socio-cultural background knowledge to be understood, identified, and moderated. However, in many regions of the Global South, there have been several documented occurrences of (1) absence of moderation and (2) censorship due to the reliance on keyword spotting out of context. Further, high-profile individuals have frequently been at the center of the moderation process, while large and targeted hate speech campaigns against minorities have been overlooked. These limitations are mainly due to the lack of high-quality data in the local languages and the failure to include local communities in the collection, annotation, and moderation processes. To address this issue, we present AfriHate: a multilingual collection of hate speech and abusive language datasets in 15 African languages. Each instance in AfriHate is annotated by native speakers familiar with the local culture. We report the challenges related to the construction of the datasets and present various classification baseline results with and without using LLMs. The datasets, individual annotations, and hate speech and offensive language lexicons are available on https://github.com/AfriHate/AfriHate

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: Afrikaans, Algerian Arabic, Amharic, English, Hausa, Hindi, Indonesian, Kinyarwanda, Marathi, Moroccan Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Punjabi, Spanish, and Telugu. These languages originate from five distinct language families and are predominantly spoken in Africa and Asia -- regions characterised by the relatively limited availability of NLP resources. Each instance in the datasets is a sentence pair associated with a score that represents the degree of semantic textual relatedness between the two sentences. Participating systems were asked to rank sentence pairs by their closeness in meaning (i.e., their degree of semantic relatedness) in the 14 languages in three main tracks: (a) supervised, (b) unsupervised, and (c) crosslingual. The task attracted 163 participants. We received 70 submissions in total (across all tasks) from 51 different teams, and 38 system description papers. We report on the best-performing systems as well as the most common and the most effective approaches for the three different tracks.

The need for Question Answering datasets in low resource languages is the motivation of this research, leading to the development of Kencorpus Swahili Question Answering Dataset, KenSwQuAD. This dataset is annotated from raw story texts of Swahili low resource language, which is a predominantly spoken in Eastern African and in other parts of the world. Question Answering (QA) datasets are important for machine comprehension of natural language for tasks such as internet search and dialog systems. Machine learning systems need training data such as the gold standard Question Answering set developed in this research. The research engaged annotators to formulate QA pairs from Swahili texts collected by the Kencorpus project, a Kenyan languages corpus. The project annotated 1,445 texts from the total 2,585 texts with at least 5 QA pairs each, resulting into a final dataset of 7,526 QA pairs. A quality assurance set of 12.5% of the annotated texts confirmed that the QA pairs were all correctly annotated. A proof of concept on applying the set to the QA task confirmed that the dataset can be usable for such tasks. KenSwQuAD has also contributed to resourcing of the Swahili language.

Local/Native South African languages are classified as low-resource languages. As such, it is essential to build the resources for these languages so that they can benefit from advances in the field of natural language processing. In this work, the focus was to create annotated news datasets for the isiZulu and Siswati native languages based on news topic classification tasks and present the findings from these baseline classification models. Due to the shortage of data for these native South African languages, the datasets that were created were augmented and oversampled to increase data size and overcome class classification imbalance. In total, four different classification models were used namely Logistic regression, Naive bayes, XGBoost and LSTM. These models were trained on three different word embeddings namely Bag-Of-Words, TFIDF and Word2vec. The results of this study showed that XGBoost, Logistic Regression and LSTM, trained from Word2vec performed better than the other combinations.

We present a novel Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) dataset for the Oromo language, a widely spoken language in Ethiopia and neighboring regions. The dataset was collected through a crowd-sourcing initiative, encompassing a diverse range of speakers and phonetic variations. It consists of 100 hours of real-world audio recordings paired with transcriptions, covering read speech in both clean and noisy environments. This dataset addresses the critical need for ASR resources for the Oromo language which is underrepresented. To show its applicability for the ASR task, we conducted experiments using the Conformer model, achieving a Word Error Rate (WER) of 15.32% with hybrid CTC and AED loss and WER of 18.74% with pure CTC loss. Additionally, fine-tuning the Whisper model resulted in a significantly improved WER of 10.82%. These results establish baselines for Oromo ASR, highlighting both the challenges and the potential for improving ASR performance in Oromo. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/turinaf/sagalee and we encourage its use for further research and development in Oromo speech processing.

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 unsupervised speech data, and show that continued pretraining HuBERT on this dataset outperforms both the base model and African-centric models on ASR. We then integrate this speech encoder into a Wolof LLM to train the first Speech LLM for this language, extending its capabilities to tasks such as speech translation. Furthermore, we explore training the Speech LLM to perform multi-step Chain-of-Thought before transcribing or translating. Our results show that the Speech LLM not only improves speech recognition but also performs well in speech translation. The models and the code will be openly shared.

In recent years, multilingual pre-trained language models have gained prominence due to their remarkable performance on numerous downstream Natural Language Processing tasks (NLP). However, pre-training these large multilingual language models requires a lot of training data, which is not available for African Languages. Active learning is a semi-supervised learning algorithm, in which a model consistently and dynamically learns to identify the most beneficial samples to train itself on, in order to achieve better optimization and performance on downstream tasks. Furthermore, active learning effectively and practically addresses real-world data scarcity. Despite all its benefits, active learning, in the context of NLP and especially multilingual language models pretraining, has received little consideration. In this paper, we present AfroLM, a multilingual language model pretrained from scratch on 23 African languages (the largest effort to date) using our novel self-active learning framework. Pretrained on a dataset significantly (14x) smaller than existing baselines, AfroLM outperforms many multilingual pretrained language models (AfriBERTa, XLMR-base, mBERT) on various NLP downstream tasks (NER, text classification, and sentiment analysis). Additional out-of-domain sentiment analysis experiments show that AfroLM is able to generalize well across various domains. We release the code source, and our datasets used in our framework at https://github.com/bonaventuredossou/MLM_AL.

Darija Open Dataset (DODa) is an open-source project for the Moroccan dialect. With more than 10,000 entries DODa is arguably the largest open-source collaborative project for Darija-English translation built for Natural Language Processing purposes. In fact, besides semantic categorization, DODa also adopts a syntactic one, presents words under different spellings, offers verb-to-noun and masculine-to-feminine correspondences, contains the conjugation of hundreds of verbs in different tenses, and many other subsets to help researchers better understand and study Moroccan dialect. This data paper presents a description of DODa, its features, how it was collected, as well as a first application in Image Classification using ImageNet labels translated to Darija. This collaborative project is hosted on GitHub platform under MIT's Open-Source license and aims to be a standard resource for researchers, students, and anyone who is interested in Moroccan Dialect

Intent classification models have made a lot of progress in recent years. However, previous studies primarily focus on high-resource languages datasets, which results in a gap for low-resource languages and for regions with a high rate of illiterate people where languages are more spoken than read or written. This is the case in Senegal, for example, where Wolof is spoken by around 90\% of the population, with an illiteracy rate of 42\% for the country. Wolof is actually spoken by more than 10 million people in West African region. To tackle such limitations, we release a Wolof Intent Classification Dataset (WolBanking77), for academic research in intent classification. WolBanking77 currently contains 9,791 text sentences in the banking domain and more than 4 hours of spoken sentences. Experiments on various baselines are conducted in this work, including text and voice state-of-the-art models. The results are very promising on this current dataset. This paper also provides detailed analyses of the contents of the data. We report baseline f1-score and word error rate metrics respectively on NLP and ASR models trained on WolBanking77 dataset and also comparisons between models. We plan to share and conduct dataset maintenance, updates and to release open-source code.

Existing data-to-text generation datasets are mostly limited to English. To address this lack of data, we create Table-to-Text in African languages (TaTa), the first large multilingual table-to-text dataset with a focus on African languages. We created TaTa by transcribing figures and accompanying text in bilingual reports by the Demographic and Health Surveys Program, followed by professional translation to make the dataset fully parallel. TaTa includes 8,700 examples in nine languages including four African languages (Hausa, Igbo, Swahili, and Yor\`ub\'a) and a zero-shot test language (Russian). We additionally release screenshots of the original figures for future research on multilingual multi-modal approaches. Through an in-depth human evaluation, we show that TaTa is challenging for current models and that less than half the outputs from an mT5-XXL-based model are understandable and attributable to the source data. We further demonstrate that existing metrics perform poorly for TaTa and introduce learned metrics that achieve a high correlation with human judgments. We release all data and annotations at https://github.com/google-research/url-nlp.

Darija Open Dataset (DODa) represents an open-source project aimed at enhancing Natural Language Processing capabilities for the Moroccan dialect, Darija. With approximately 100,000 entries, DODa stands as the largest collaborative project of its kind for Darija-English translation. The dataset features semantic and syntactic categorizations, variations in spelling, verb conjugations across multiple tenses, as well as tens of thousands of translated sentences. The dataset includes entries written in both Latin and Arabic alphabets, reflecting the linguistic variations and preferences found in different sources and applications. The availability of such dataset is critical for developing applications that can accurately understand and generate Darija, thus supporting the linguistic needs of the Moroccan community and potentially extending to similar dialects in neighboring regions. This paper explores the strategic importance of DODa, its current achievements, and the envisioned future enhancements that will continue to promote its use and expansion in the global NLP landscape.

Although researchers and practitioners are pushing the boundaries and enhancing the capacities of NLP tools and methods, works on African languages are lagging. A lot of focus on well resourced languages such as English, Japanese, German, French, Russian, Mandarin Chinese etc. Over 97% of the world's 7000 languages, including African languages, are low resourced for NLP i.e. they have little or no data, tools, and techniques for NLP research. For instance, only 5 out of 2965, 0.19% authors of full text papers in the ACL Anthology extracted from the 5 major conferences in 2018 ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, COLING and CoNLL, are affiliated to African institutions. In this work, we discuss our effort toward building a standard machine translation benchmark dataset for Igbo, one of the 3 major Nigerian languages. Igbo is spoken by more than 50 million people globally with over 50% of the speakers are in southeastern Nigeria. Igbo is low resourced although there have been some efforts toward developing IgboNLP such as part of speech tagging and diacritic restoration

We address a notable gap in Natural Language Processing (NLP) by introducing a collection of resources designed to improve Machine Translation (MT) for low-resource languages, with a specific focus on African languages. First, we introduce two language models (LMs), Cheetah-1.2B and Cheetah-3.7B, with 1.2 billion and 3.7 billion parameters respectively. Next, we finetune the aforementioned models to create toucan, an Afrocentric machine translation model designed to support 156 African language pairs. To evaluate Toucan, we carefully develop an extensive machine translation benchmark, dubbed AfroLingu-MT, tailored for evaluating machine translation. Toucan significantly outperforms other models, showcasing its remarkable performance on MT for African languages. Finally, we train a new model, spBLEU-1K, to enhance translation evaluation metrics, covering 1K languages, including 614 African languages. This work aims to advance the field of NLP, fostering cross-cultural understanding and knowledge exchange, particularly in regions with limited language resources such as Africa. The GitHub repository for the Toucan project is available at https://github.com/UBC-NLP/Toucan.

The paper describes the University of Cape Town's submission to the constrained track of the WMT22 Shared Task: Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for African Languages. Our system is a single multilingual translation model that translates between English and 8 South / South East African Languages, as well as between specific pairs of the African languages. We used several techniques suited for low-resource machine translation (MT), including overlap BPE, back-translation, synthetic training data generation, and adding more translation directions during training. Our results show the value of these techniques, especially for directions where very little or no bilingual training data is available.

Despite the progress we have recorded in scaling multilingual machine translation (MT) models and evaluation data to several under-resourced African languages, it is difficult to measure accurately the progress we have made on these languages because evaluation is often performed on n-gram matching metrics like BLEU that often have worse correlation with human judgments. Embedding-based metrics such as COMET correlate better; however, lack of evaluation data with human ratings for under-resourced languages, complexity of annotation guidelines like Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), and limited language coverage of multilingual encoders have hampered their applicability to African languages. In this paper, we address these challenges by creating high-quality human evaluation data with a simplified MQM guideline for error-span annotation and direct assessment (DA) scoring for 13 typologically diverse African languages. Furthermore, we develop AfriCOMET, a COMET evaluation metric for African languages by leveraging DA training data from high-resource languages and African-centric multilingual encoder (AfroXLM-Roberta) to create the state-of-the-art evaluation metric for African languages MT with respect to Spearman-rank correlation with human judgments (+0.406).

JamPatoisNLI provides the first dataset for natural language inference in a creole language, Jamaican Patois. Many of the most-spoken low-resource languages are creoles. These languages commonly have a lexicon derived from a major world language and a distinctive grammar reflecting the languages of the original speakers and the process of language birth by creolization. This gives them a distinctive place in exploring the effectiveness of transfer from large monolingual or multilingual pretrained models. While our work, along with previous work, shows that transfer from these models to low-resource languages that are unrelated to languages in their training set is not very effective, we would expect stronger results from transfer to creoles. Indeed, our experiments show considerably better results from few-shot learning of JamPatoisNLI than for such unrelated languages, and help us begin to understand how the unique relationship between creoles and their high-resource base languages affect cross-lingual transfer. JamPatoisNLI, which consists of naturally-occurring premises and expert-written hypotheses, is a step towards steering research into a traditionally underserved language and a useful benchmark for understanding cross-lingual NLP.

Scaling multilingual representation learning beyond the hundred most frequent languages is challenging, in particular to cover the long tail of low-resource languages. A promising approach has been to train one-for-all multilingual models capable of cross-lingual transfer, but these models often suffer from insufficient capacity and interference between unrelated languages. Instead, we move away from this approach and focus on training multiple language (family) specific representations, but most prominently enable all languages to still be encoded in the same representational space. To achieve this, we focus on teacher-student training, allowing all encoders to be mutually compatible for bitext mining, and enabling fast learning of new languages. We introduce a new teacher-student training scheme which combines supervised and self-supervised training, allowing encoders to take advantage of monolingual training data, which is valuable in the low-resource setting. Our approach significantly outperforms the original LASER encoder. We study very low-resource languages and handle 50 African languages, many of which are not covered by any other model. For these languages, we train sentence encoders, mine bitexts, and validate the bitexts by training NMT systems.

The local languages in Senegal, like those of West African countries in general, are written based on two alphabets: supplemented Arabic alphabet (called Ajami) and Latin alphabet. Each writing has its own applications. Ajami writing is generally used by people educated in Koranic schools for communication, business, literature (religious texts, poetry, etc.), traditional religious medicine, etc. Writing with Latin characters is used for localization of ICT (Web, dictionaries, Windows and Google tools translated in Wolof, etc.), the translation of legal texts (commercial code and constitution translated in Wolof) and religious ones (Quran and Bible in Wolof), book edition, etc. To facilitate both populations general access to knowledge, it is useful to set up transliteration tools between these two scriptures. This work falls within the framework of the implementation of project for a collaborative online dictionary Wolof (Nguer E. M., Khoule M, Thiam M. N., Mbaye B. T., Thiare O., Cisse M. T., Mangeot M. 2014), which will involve people using Ajami writing. Our goal will consist, on the one hand in raising the issues related to the transliteration and the challenges that this will raise, and on the other one, presenting the perspectives.

Exploring and quantifying semantic relatedness is central to representing language. It holds significant implications across various NLP tasks, including offering insights into the capabilities and performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). While earlier NLP research primarily focused on semantic similarity, often within the English language context, we instead investigate the broader phenomenon of semantic relatedness. In this paper, we present SemRel, a new semantic relatedness dataset collection annotated by native speakers across 14 languages:Afrikaans, Algerian Arabic, Amharic, English, Hausa, Hindi, Indonesian, Kinyarwanda, Marathi, Moroccan Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Punjabi, Spanish, and Telugu. These languages originate from five distinct language families and are predominantly spoken in Africa and Asia -- regions characterised by a relatively limited availability of NLP resources. Each instance in the SemRel datasets is a sentence pair associated with a score that represents the degree of semantic textual relatedness between the two sentences. The scores are obtained using a comparative annotation framework. We describe the data collection and annotation processes, related challenges when building the datasets, and their impact and utility in NLP. We further report experiments for each language and across the different languages.

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 (ZA-gov-multilingual), that are translated into all 11 South African official languages. The corpora can be used for a myriad of downstream NLP tasks. The corpora were created to allow researchers to study the language used in South African government publications, with a focus on understanding how South African government officials communicate with their constituents. In this paper we highlight the process of gathering, cleaning and making available the corpora. We create parallel sentence corpora for Neural Machine Translation (NMT) tasks using Language-Agnostic Sentence Representations (LASER) embeddings. With these aligned sentences we then provide NMT benchmarks for 9 indigenous languages by fine-tuning a massively multilingual pre-trained language model.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly multilingual, yet open models continue to underperform relative to proprietary systems, with the gap most pronounced for African languages. Continued pre-training (CPT) offers a practical route to language adaptation, but improvements on demanding capabilities such as mathematical reasoning often remain limited. This limitation is driven in part by the uneven domain coverage and missing task-relevant knowledge that characterize many low-resource language corpora. We present AfriqueLLM, a suite of open LLMs adapted to 20 African languages through CPT on 26B tokens. We perform a comprehensive empirical study across five base models spanning sizes and architectures, including Llama 3.1, Gemma 3, and Qwen 3, and systematically analyze how CPT data composition shapes downstream performance. In particular, we vary mixtures that include math, code, and synthetic translated data, and evaluate the resulting models on a range of multilingual benchmarks. Our results identify data composition as the primary driver of CPT gains. Adding math, code, and synthetic translated data yields consistent improvements, including on reasoning-oriented evaluations. Within a fixed architecture, larger models typically improve performance, but architectural choices dominate scale when comparing across model families. Moreover, strong multilingual performance in the base model does not reliably predict post-CPT outcomes; robust architectures coupled with task-aligned data provide a more dependable recipe. Finally, our best models improve long-context performance, including document-level translation. Models have been released on [Huggingface](https://huggingface.co/collections/McGill-NLP/afriquellm).

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has increasing utility in the modern world. There are a many ASR models available for languages with large amounts of training data like English. However, low-resource languages are poorly represented. In response we create and release an open-licensed and formatted dataset of audio recordings of the Bible in low-resource northern Indian languages. We setup multiple experimental splits and train and analyze two competitive ASR models to serve as the baseline for future research using this data.

Although the Indonesian language is spoken by almost 200 million people and the 10th most spoken language in the world, it is under-represented in NLP research. Previous work on Indonesian has been hampered by a lack of annotated datasets, a sparsity of language resources, and a lack of resource standardization. In this work, we release the IndoLEM dataset comprising seven tasks for the Indonesian language, spanning morpho-syntax, semantics, and discourse. We additionally release IndoBERT, a new pre-trained language model for Indonesian, and evaluate it over IndoLEM, in addition to benchmarking it against existing resources. Our experiments show that IndoBERT achieves state-of-the-art performance over most of the tasks in IndoLEM.

African languages are severely under-represented in NLP research due to lack of datasets covering several NLP tasks. While there are individual language specific datasets that are being expanded to different tasks, only a handful of NLP tasks (e.g. named entity recognition and machine translation) have standardized benchmark datasets covering several geographical and typologically-diverse African languages. In this paper, we develop MasakhaNEWS -- a new benchmark dataset for news topic classification covering 16 languages widely spoken in Africa. We provide an evaluation of baseline models by training classical machine learning models and fine-tuning several language models. Furthermore, we explore several alternatives to full fine-tuning of language models that are better suited for zero-shot and few-shot learning such as cross-lingual parameter-efficient fine-tuning (like MAD-X), pattern exploiting training (PET), prompting language models (like ChatGPT), and prompt-free sentence transformer fine-tuning (SetFit and Cohere Embedding API). Our evaluation in zero-shot setting shows the potential of prompting ChatGPT for news topic classification in low-resource African languages, achieving an average performance of 70 F1 points without leveraging additional supervision like MAD-X. In few-shot setting, we show that with as little as 10 examples per label, we achieved more than 90\% (i.e. 86.0 F1 points) of the performance of full supervised training (92.6 F1 points) leveraging the PET approach.

This paper presents a spell checker and correction tool specifically designed for Wolof, an under-represented spoken language in Africa. The proposed spell checker leverages a combination of a trie data structure, dynamic programming, and the weighted Levenshtein distance to generate suggestions for misspelled words. We created novel linguistic resources for Wolof, such as a lexicon and a corpus of misspelled words, using a semi-automatic approach that combines manual and automatic annotation methods. Despite the limited data available for the Wolof language, the spell checker's performance showed a predictive accuracy of 98.31% and a suggestion accuracy of 93.33%. Our primary focus remains the revitalization and preservation of Wolof as an Indigenous and spoken language in Africa, providing our efforts to develop novel linguistic resources. This work represents a valuable contribution to the growth of computational tools and resources for the Wolof language and provides a strong foundation for future studies in the automatic spell checking and correction field.

This paper presents an overview of a program designed to address the growing need for developing freely available speech resources for under-represented languages. At present we have released 38 datasets for building text-to-speech and automatic speech recognition applications for languages and dialects of South and Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe and South America. The paper describes the methodology used for developing such corpora and presents some of our findings that could benefit under-represented language communities.

Tamil, a Dravidian language of South Asia, is a highly diglossic language with two very different registers in everyday use: Literary Tamil (preferred in writing and formal communication) and Spoken Tamil (confined to speech and informal media). Spoken Tamil is under-supported in modern NLP systems. In this paper, we release IruMozhi, a human-annotated dataset of parallel text in Literary and Spoken Tamil. We train classifiers on the task of identifying which variety a text belongs to. We use these models to gauge the availability of pretraining data in Spoken Tamil, to audit the composition of existing labelled datasets for Tamil, and to encourage future work on the variety.

This paper presents Killkan, the first dataset for automatic speech recognition (ASR) in the Kichwa language, an indigenous language of Ecuador. Kichwa is an extremely low-resource endangered language, and there have been no resources before Killkan for Kichwa to be incorporated in applications of natural language processing. The dataset contains approximately 4 hours of audio with transcription, translation into Spanish, and morphosyntactic annotation in the format of Universal Dependencies. The audio data was retrieved from a publicly available radio program in Kichwa. This paper also provides corpus-linguistic analyses of the dataset with a special focus on the agglutinative morphology of Kichwa and frequent code-switching with Spanish. The experiments show that the dataset makes it possible to develop the first ASR system for Kichwa with reliable quality despite its small dataset size. This dataset, the ASR model, and the code used to develop them will be publicly available. Thus, our study positively showcases resource building and its applications for low-resource languages and their community.

Pre-trained transformers are now the de facto models in Natural Language Processing given their state-of-the-art results in many tasks and languages. However, most of the current models have been trained on languages for which large text resources are already available (such as English, French, Arabic, etc.). Therefore, there are still a number of low-resource languages that need more attention from the community. In this paper, we study the Algerian dialect which has several specificities that make the use of Arabic or multilingual models inappropriate. To address this issue, we collected more than one million Algerian tweets, and pre-trained the first Algerian language model: DziriBERT. When compared with existing models, DziriBERT achieves better results, especially when dealing with the Roman script. The obtained results show that pre-training a dedicated model on a small dataset (150 MB) can outperform existing models that have been trained on much more data (hundreds of GB). Finally, our model is publicly available to the community.

Building effective neural machine translation (NMT) models for very low-resourced and morphologically rich African indigenous languages is an open challenge. Besides the issue of finding available resources for them, a lot of work is put into preprocessing and tokenization. Recent studies have shown that standard tokenization methods do not always adequately deal with the grammatical, diacritical, and tonal properties of some African languages. That, coupled with the extremely low availability of training samples, hinders the production of reliable NMT models. In this paper, using Fon language as a case study, we revisit standard tokenization methods and introduce Word-Expressions-Based (WEB) tokenization, a human-involved super-words tokenization strategy to create a better representative vocabulary for training. Furthermore, we compare our tokenization strategy to others on the Fon-French and French-Fon translation tasks.

To foster the neural encoding of Portuguese, this paper contributes foundation encoder models that represent an expansion of the still very scarce ecosystem of large language models specifically developed for this language that are fully open, in the sense that they are open source and openly distributed for free under an open license for any purpose, thus including research and commercial usages. Like most languages other than English, Portuguese is low-resourced in terms of these foundational language resources, there being the inaugural 900 million parameter Albertina and 335 million Bertimbau. Taking this couple of models as an inaugural set, we present the extension of the ecosystem of state-of-the-art open encoders for Portuguese with a larger, top performance-driven model with 1.5 billion parameters, and a smaller, efficiency-driven model with 100 million parameters. While achieving this primary goal, further results that are relevant for this ecosystem were obtained as well, namely new datasets for Portuguese based on the SuperGLUE benchmark, which we also distribute openly.

On social media, Arabic people tend to express themselves in their own local dialects. More particularly, Tunisians use the informal way called "Tunisian Arabizi". Analytical studies seek to explore and recognize online opinions aiming to exploit them for planning and prediction purposes such as measuring the customer satisfaction and establishing sales and marketing strategies. However, analytical studies based on Deep Learning are data hungry. On the other hand, African languages and dialects are considered low resource languages. For instance, to the best of our knowledge, no annotated Tunisian Arabizi dataset exists. In this paper, we introduce TUNIZI a sentiment analysis Tunisian Arabizi Dataset, collected from social networks, preprocessed for analytical studies and annotated manually by Tunisian native speakers.

The recent proliferation of Large Conversation Language Models has highlighted the economic significance of widespread access to this type of AI technologies in the current information age. Nevertheless, prevailing models have primarily been trained on corpora consisting of documents written in popular languages. The dearth of such cutting-edge tools for low-resource languages further exacerbates their underrepresentation in the current economic landscape, thereby impacting their native speakers. This paper introduces two novel resources designed to enhance Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the Galician language. We present a Galician adaptation of the Alpaca dataset, comprising 52,000 instructions and demonstrations. This dataset proves invaluable for enhancing language models by fine-tuning them to more accurately adhere to provided instructions. Additionally, as a demonstration of the dataset utility, we fine-tuned LLaMA-7B to comprehend and respond in Galician, a language not originally supported by the model, by following the Alpaca format. This work contributes to the research on multilingual models tailored for low-resource settings, a crucial endeavor in ensuring the inclusion of all linguistic communities in the development of Large Language Models. Another noteworthy aspect of this research is the exploration of how knowledge of a closely related language, in this case, Portuguese, can assist in generating coherent text when training resources are scarce. Both the Galician Alpaca dataset and Cabuxa-7B are publicly accessible on our Huggingface Hub, and we have made the source code available to facilitate replication of this experiment and encourage further advancements for underrepresented languages.

Recent advances in speech synthesis have enabled many useful applications like audio directions in Google Maps, screen readers, and automated content generation on platforms like TikTok. However, these systems are mostly dominated by voices sourced from data-rich geographies with personas representative of their source data. Although 3000 of the world's languages are domiciled in Africa, African voices and personas are under-represented in these systems. As speech synthesis becomes increasingly democratized, it is desirable to increase the representation of African English accents. We present Afro-TTS, the first pan-African accented English speech synthesis system able to generate speech in 86 African accents, with 1000 personas representing the rich phonological diversity across the continent for downstream application in Education, Public Health, and Automated Content Creation. Speaker interpolation retains naturalness and accentedness, enabling the creation of new voices.

The critical lack of structured terminological data for South Africa's official languages hampers progress in multilingual NLP, despite the existence of numerous government and academic terminology lists. These valuable assets remain fragmented and locked in non-machine-readable formats, rendering them unusable for computational research and development. Marito addresses this challenge by systematically aggregating, cleaning, and standardising these scattered resources into open, interoperable datasets. We introduce the foundational Marito dataset, released under the equitable, Africa-centered NOODL framework. To demonstrate its immediate utility, we integrate the terminology into a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline. Experiments show substantial improvements in the accuracy and domain-specific consistency of English-to-Tshivenda machine translation for large language models. Marito provides a scalable foundation for developing robust and equitable NLP technologies, ensuring South Africa's rich linguistic diversity is represented in the digital age.

In NLP, text classification is one of the primary problems we try to solve and its uses in language analyses are indisputable. The lack of labeled training data made it harder to do these tasks in low resource languages like Amharic. The task of collecting, labeling, annotating, and making valuable this kind of data will encourage junior researchers, schools, and machine learning practitioners to implement existing classification models in their language. In this short paper, we aim to introduce the Amharic text classification dataset that consists of more than 50k news articles that were categorized into 6 classes. This dataset is made available with easy baseline performances to encourage studies and better performance experiments.

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, though their speakers could benefit from machine translation (MT). These languages are predominantly used in much of Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean. We present the largest cumulative dataset to date for Creole language MT, including 14.5M unique Creole sentences with parallel translations -- 11.6M of which we release publicly, and the largest bitexts gathered to date for 41 languages -- the first ever for 21. In addition, we provide MT models supporting all 41 Creole languages in 172 translation directions. Given our diverse dataset, we produce a model for Creole language MT exposed to more genre diversity than ever before, which outperforms a genre-specific Creole MT model on its own benchmark for 26 of 34 translation directions.

The advancement of speech technology has predominantly favored high-resource languages, creating a significant digital divide for speakers of most Sub-Saharan African languages. To address this gap, we introduce WAXAL, a large-scale, openly accessible speech dataset for 21 languages representing over 100 million speakers. The collection consists of two main components: an Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) dataset containing approximately 1,250 hours of transcribed, natural speech from a diverse range of speakers, and a Text-to-Speech (TTS) dataset with over 180 hours of high-quality, single-speaker recordings reading phonetically balanced scripts. This paper details our methodology for data collection, annotation, and quality control, which involved partnerships with four African academic and community organizations. We provide a detailed statistical overview of the dataset and discuss its potential limitations and ethical considerations. The WAXAL datasets are released at https://huggingface.co/datasets/google/WaxalNLP under the permissive CC-BY-4.0 license to catalyze research, enable the development of inclusive technologies, and serve as a vital resource for the digital preservation of these languages.

Large Language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on a wide range of tasks, including in multimodal settings such as speech. However, their evaluation is often limited to English and a few high-resource languages. For low-resource languages, there is no standardized evaluation benchmark. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing mSTEB, a new benchmark to evaluate the performance of LLMs on a wide range of tasks covering language identification, text classification, question answering, and translation tasks on both speech and text modalities. We evaluated the performance of leading LLMs such as Gemini 2.0 Flash and GPT-4o (Audio) and state-of-the-art open models such as Qwen 2 Audio and Gemma 3 27B. Our evaluation shows a wide gap in performance between high-resource and low-resource languages, especially for languages spoken in Africa and Americas/Oceania. Our findings show that more investment is needed to address their under-representation in LLMs coverage.

How do humans learn language, and can the first language be learned at all? These fundamental questions are still hotly debated. In contemporary linguistics, there are two major schools of thought that give completely opposite answers. According to Chomsky's theory of universal grammar, language cannot be learned because children are not exposed to sufficient data in their linguistic environment. In contrast, usage-based models of language assume a profound relationship between language structure and language use. In particular, contextual mental processing and mental representations are assumed to have the cognitive capacity to capture the complexity of actual language use at all levels. The prime example is syntax, i.e., the rules by which words are assembled into larger units such as sentences. Typically, syntactic rules are expressed as sequences of word classes. However, it remains unclear whether word classes are innate, as implied by universal grammar, or whether they emerge during language acquisition, as suggested by usage-based approaches. Here, we address this issue from a machine learning and natural language processing perspective. In particular, we trained an artificial deep neural network on predicting the next word, provided sequences of consecutive words as input. Subsequently, we analyzed the emerging activation patterns in the hidden layers of the neural network. Strikingly, we find that the internal representations of nine-word input sequences cluster according to the word class of the tenth word to be predicted as output, even though the neural network did not receive any explicit information about syntactic rules or word classes during training. This surprising result suggests, that also in the human brain, abstract representational categories such as word classes may naturally emerge as a consequence of predictive coding and processing during language acquisition.

African languages have far less in-language content available digitally, making it challenging for question answering systems to satisfy the information needs of users. Cross-lingual open-retrieval question answering (XOR QA) systems -- those that retrieve answer content from other languages while serving people in their native language -- offer a means of filling this gap. To this end, we create AfriQA, the first cross-lingual QA dataset with a focus on African languages. AfriQA includes 12,000+ XOR QA examples across 10 African languages. While previous datasets have focused primarily on languages where cross-lingual QA augments coverage from the target language, AfriQA focuses on languages where cross-lingual answer content is the only high-coverage source of answer content. Because of this, we argue that African languages are one of the most important and realistic use cases for XOR QA. Our experiments demonstrate the poor performance of automatic translation and multilingual retrieval methods. Overall, AfriQA proves challenging for state-of-the-art QA models. We hope that the dataset enables the development of more equitable QA technology.

This paper describes the University of Sydney& JD's joint submission of the IWSLT 2021 low resource speech translation task. We participated in the Swahili-English direction and got the best scareBLEU (25.3) score among all the participants. Our constrained system is based on a pipeline framework, i.e. ASR and NMT. We trained our models with the officially provided ASR and MT datasets. The ASR system is based on the open-sourced tool Kaldi and this work mainly explores how to make the most of the NMT models. To reduce the punctuation errors generated by the ASR model, we employ our previous work SlotRefine to train a punctuation correction model. To achieve better translation performance, we explored the most recent effective strategies, including back translation, knowledge distillation, multi-feature reranking and transductive finetuning. For model structure, we tried auto-regressive and non-autoregressive models, respectively. In addition, we proposed two novel pre-train approaches, i.e. de-noising training and bidirectional training to fully exploit the data. Extensive experiments show that adding the above techniques consistently improves the BLEU scores, and the final submission system outperforms the baseline (Transformer ensemble model trained with the original parallel data) by approximately 10.8 BLEU score, achieving the SOTA performance.

Despite the progress we have recorded in the last few years in multilingual natural language processing, evaluation is typically limited to a small set of languages with available datasets which excludes a large number of low-resource languages. In this paper, we created SIB-200 -- a large-scale open-sourced benchmark dataset for topic classification in 200 languages and dialects to address the lack of evaluation dataset for Natural Language Understanding (NLU). For many of the languages covered in SIB-200, this is the first publicly available evaluation dataset for NLU. The dataset is based on Flores-200 machine translation corpus. We annotated the English portion of the dataset and extended the sentence-level annotation to the remaining 203 languages covered in the corpus. Despite the simplicity of this task, our evaluation in full-supervised setting, cross-lingual transfer setting and prompting of large language model setting show that there is still a large gap between the performance of high-resource and low-resource languages when multilingual evaluation is scaled to numerous world languages. We found that languages unseen during the pre-training of multilingual language models, under-represented language families (like Nilotic and Altantic-Congo), and languages from the regions of Africa, Americas, Oceania and South East Asia, often have the lowest performance on our topic classification dataset. We hope our dataset will encourage a more inclusive evaluation of multilingual language models on a more diverse set of languages. https://github.com/dadelani/sib-200

Sentiment analysis is one of the most widely studied applications in NLP, but most work focuses on languages with large amounts of data. We introduce the first large-scale human-annotated Twitter sentiment dataset for the four most widely spoken languages in Nigeria (Hausa, Igbo, Nigerian-Pidgin, and Yor\`ub\'a ) consisting of around 30,000 annotated tweets per language (and 14,000 for Nigerian-Pidgin), including a significant fraction of code-mixed tweets. We propose text collection, filtering, processing and labeling methods that enable us to create datasets for these low-resource languages. We evaluate a rangeof pre-trained models and transfer strategies on the dataset. We find that language-specific models and language-adaptivefine-tuning generally perform best. We release the datasets, trained models, sentiment lexicons, and code to incentivizeresearch on sentiment analysis in under-represented languages.

We present the first Africentric SemEval Shared task, Sentiment Analysis for African Languages (AfriSenti-SemEval) - The dataset is available at https://github.com/afrisenti-semeval/afrisent-semeval-2023. AfriSenti-SemEval is a sentiment classification challenge in 14 African languages: Amharic, Algerian Arabic, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Moroccan Arabic, Mozambican Portuguese, Nigerian Pidgin, Oromo, Swahili, Tigrinya, Twi, Xitsonga, and Yor\`ub\'a (Muhammad et al., 2023), using data labeled with 3 sentiment classes. We present three subtasks: (1) Task A: monolingual classification, which received 44 submissions; (2) Task B: multilingual classification, which received 32 submissions; and (3) Task C: zero-shot classification, which received 34 submissions. The best performance for tasks A and B was achieved by NLNDE team with 71.31 and 75.06 weighted F1, respectively. UCAS-IIE-NLP achieved the best average score for task C with 58.15 weighted F1. We describe the various approaches adopted by the top 10 systems and their approaches.

NLP Ghana is an open-source non-profit organization aiming to advance the development and adoption of state-of-the-art NLP techniques and digital language tools to Ghanaian languages and problems. In this paper, we first present the motivation and necessity for the efforts of the organization; by introducing some popular Ghanaian languages while presenting the state of NLP in Ghana. We then present the NLP Ghana organization and outline its aims, scope of work, some of the methods employed and contributions made thus far in the NLP community in Ghana.

High-resource language models often fall short in the African context, where there is a critical need for models that are efficient, accessible, and locally relevant, even amidst significant computing and data constraints. This paper introduces InkubaLM, a small language model with 0.4 billion parameters, which achieves performance comparable to models with significantly larger parameter counts and more extensive training data on tasks such as machine translation, question-answering, AfriMMLU, and the AfriXnli task. Notably, InkubaLM outperforms many larger models in sentiment analysis and demonstrates remarkable consistency across multiple languages. This work represents a pivotal advancement in challenging the conventional paradigm that effective language models must rely on substantial resources. Our model and datasets are publicly available \url{https://huggingface.co/lelapa} to encourage research and development on low-resource languages.

We present HebDB, a weakly supervised dataset for spoken language processing in the Hebrew language. HebDB offers roughly 2500 hours of natural and spontaneous speech recordings in the Hebrew language, consisting of a large variety of speakers and topics. We provide raw recordings together with a pre-processed, weakly supervised, and filtered version. The goal of HebDB is to further enhance research and development of spoken language processing tools for the Hebrew language. Hence, we additionally provide two baseline systems for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR): (i) a self-supervised model; and (ii) a fully supervised model. We present the performance of these two methods optimized on HebDB and compare them to current multi-lingual ASR alternatives. Results suggest the proposed method reaches better results than the evaluated baselines considering similar model sizes. Dataset, code, and models are publicly available under https://pages.cs.huji.ac.il/adiyoss-lab/HebDB/.

In this paper, we investigate the use of N-gram models and Large Pre-trained Multilingual models for Language Identification (LID) across 11 South African languages. For N-gram models, this study shows that effective data size selection remains crucial for establishing effective frequency distributions of the target languages, that efficiently model each language, thus, improving language ranking. For pre-trained multilingual models, we conduct extensive experiments covering a diverse set of massively pre-trained multilingual (PLM) models -- mBERT, RemBERT, XLM-r, and Afri-centric multilingual models -- AfriBERTa, Afro-XLMr, AfroLM, and Serengeti. We further compare these models with available large-scale Language Identification tools: Compact Language Detector v3 (CLD V3), AfroLID, GlotLID, and OpenLID to highlight the importance of focused-based LID. From these, we show that Serengeti is a superior model across models: N-grams to Transformers on average. Moreover, we propose a lightweight BERT-based LID model (za_BERT_lid) trained with NHCLT + Vukzenzele corpus, which performs on par with our best-performing Afri-centric models.

In this paper we discuss an in-progress work on the development of a speech corpus for four low-resource Indo-Aryan languages -- Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Braj and Magahi using the field methods of linguistic data collection. The total size of the corpus currently stands at approximately 18 hours (approx. 4-5 hours each language) and it is transcribed and annotated with grammatical information such as part-of-speech tags, morphological features and Universal dependency relationships. We discuss our methodology for data collection in these languages, most of which was done in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, with one of the aims being to generate some additional income for low-income groups speaking these languages. In the paper, we also discuss the results of the baseline experiments for automatic speech recognition system in these languages.

This paper introduces the first standardized benchmark for evaluating Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in the Bambara language, utilizing one hour of professionally recorded Malian constitutional text. Designed as a controlled reference set under near-optimal acoustic and linguistic conditions, the benchmark was used to evaluate 37 models, ranging from Bambara-trained systems to large-scale commercial models. Our findings reveal that current ASR performance remains significantly below deployment standards in a narrow formal domain; the top-performing system in terms of Word Error Rate (WER) achieved 46.76\% and the best Character Error Rate (CER) of 13.00\% was set by another model, while several prominent multilingual models exceeded 100\% WER. These results suggest that multilingual pre-training and model scaling alone are insufficient for underrepresented languages. Furthermore, because this dataset represents a best-case scenario of the most simplified and formal form of spoken Bambara, these figures are yet to be tested against practical, real-world settings. We provide the benchmark and an accompanying public leaderboard to facilitate transparent evaluation and future research in Bambara speech technology.

Speech technology remains out of reach for most of the over 2300 languages in Africa. We present the first systematic assessment of large-scale synthetic voice corpora for African ASR. We apply a three-step process: LLM-driven text creation, TTS voice synthesis, and ASR fine-tuning. Eight out of ten languages for which we create synthetic text achieved readability scores above 5 out of 7. We evaluated ASR improvement for three (Hausa, Dholuo, Chichewa) and created more than 2,500 hours of synthetic voice data at below 1% of the cost of real data. Fine-tuned Wav2Vec-BERT-2.0 models trained on 250h real and 250h synthetic Hausa matched a 500h real-data-only baseline, while 579h real and 450h to 993h synthetic data created the best performance. We also present gender-disaggregated ASR performance evaluation. For very low-resource languages, gains varied: Chichewa WER improved about 6.5% relative with a 1:2 real-to-synthetic ratio; a 1:1 ratio for Dholuo showed similar improvements on some evaluation data, but not on others. Investigating intercoder reliability, ASR errors and evaluation datasets revealed the need for more robust reviewer protocols and more accurate evaluation data. All data and models are publicly released to invite further work to improve synthetic data for African languages.

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has predominantly focused on high-resource languages, leaving low-resource languages, such as those in the Finno-Ugric family, significantly underrepresented. This paper addresses this gap by focusing on V\~oro, Livonian, and Komi. We cover almost the entire cycle of LLM creation, from data collection to instruction tuning and evaluation. Our contributions include developing multilingual base and instruction-tuned models; creating evaluation benchmarks, including the smugri-MT-bench multi-turn conversational benchmark; and conducting human evaluation. We intend for this work to promote linguistic diversity, ensuring that lesser-resourced languages can benefit from advancements in NLP.

We report the development of Japanese SimCSE, Japanese sentence embedding models fine-tuned with SimCSE. Since there is a lack of sentence embedding models for Japanese that can be used as a baseline in sentence embedding research, we conducted extensive experiments on Japanese sentence embeddings involving 24 pre-trained Japanese or multilingual language models, five supervised datasets, and four unsupervised datasets. In this report, we provide the detailed training setup for Japanese SimCSE and their evaluation results.

This paper introduces the open-source dataset WanJuanSiLu, designed to provide high-quality training corpora for low-resource languages, thereby advancing the research and development of multilingual models. To achieve this, we have developed a systematic data processing framework tailored for low-resource languages. This framework encompasses key stages such as data extraction, corpus cleaning, content deduplication, security filtering, quality evaluation, and theme classification. Through the implementation of this framework, we have significantly improved both the quality and security of the dataset, while maintaining its linguistic diversity. As of now, data for all five languages have been fully open-sourced. The dataset can be accessed at https://opendatalab.com/applyMultilingualCorpus, and GitHub repository is available at https://github.com/opendatalab/WanJuan3.0

The advances of Generative AI models with interactive capabilities over the past few years offer unique opportunities for socioeconomic mobility. Their potential for scalability, accessibility, affordability, personalizing and convenience sets a first-class opportunity for poverty-stricken countries to adapt and modernize their educational order. As a result, this position paper makes the case for an educational policy framework that would succeed in this transformation by prioritizing vocational and technical training over academic education in sub-Saharan African countries. We highlight substantial applications of Large Language Models, tailor-made to their respective cultural background(s) and needs, that would reinforce their systemic decolonization. Lastly, we provide specific historical examples of diverse states successfully implementing such policies in the elementary steps of their socioeconomic transformation, in order to corroborate our proposal to sub-Saharan African countries to follow their lead.

We introduce Universal NER (UNER), an open, community-driven project to develop gold-standard NER benchmarks in many languages. The overarching goal of UNER is to provide high-quality, cross-lingually consistent annotations to facilitate and standardize multilingual NER research. UNER v1 contains 18 datasets annotated with named entities in a cross-lingual consistent schema across 12 diverse languages. In this paper, we detail the dataset creation and composition of UNER; we also provide initial modeling baselines on both in-language and cross-lingual learning settings. We release the data, code, and fitted models to the public.