52 citations · 162 across the 24 of their papers we have counts for
27 papers
AfriNames: Most ASR models "butcher" African Names
Tobi Olatunji, Tejumade Afonja, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou +4
Useful conversational agents must accurately capture named entities to minimize error for downstream tasks, for example, asking a voice assistant to play a track from a certain art…
MasakhaPOS: Part-of-Speech Tagging for Typologically Diverse African Languages
Cheikh M. Bamba Dione, David Adelani, Peter Nabende +41
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…
AfriQA: Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering for African Languages
Odunayo Ogundepo, Tajuddeen R. Gwadabe, Clara E. Rivera +49
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-lingu…
AfroDigits: A Community-Driven Spoken Digit Dataset for African Languages
Chris Chinenye Emezue, Sanchit Gandhi, Lewis Tunstall +10
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 thi…
MasakhaNEWS: News Topic Classification for African languages
David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Marek Masiak, Israel Abebe Azime +62
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…
Adapting to the Low-Resource Double-Bind: Investigating Low-Compute Methods on Low-Resource African Languages
Colin Leong, Herumb Shandilya, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou +10
Many natural language processing (NLP) tasks make use of massively pre-trained language models, which are computationally expensive. However, access to high computational resources…
The African Stopwords project: curating stopwords for African languages
Chris Emezue, Hellina Nigatu, Cynthia Thinwa +19
Stopwords are fundamental in Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for information retrieval. One of the common tasks in preprocessing of text data is the removal of stopwor…
AfroLM: A Self-Active Learning-based Multilingual Pretrained Language Model for 23 African Languages
Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Oreen Yousuf +5
In recent years, multilingual pre-trained language models have gained prominence due to their remarkable performance on numerous downstream Natural Language Processing tasks (NLP).…
MasakhaNER 2.0: Africa-centric Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognition
David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Graham Neubig, Sebastian Ruder +42
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 o…
BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model
BigScience Workshop, :, Teven Le Scao +391
Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to wi…
Separating Grains from the Chaff: Using Data Filtering to Improve Multilingual Translation for Low-Resourced African Languages
Idris Abdulmumin, Michael Beukman, Jesujoba O. Alabi +8
We participated in the WMT 2022 Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for the African Languages Shared Task. This work describes our approach, which is based on filtering the…
GFlowOut: Dropout with Generative Flow Networks
Dianbo Liu, Moksh Jain, Bonaventure Dossou +10
Bayesian Inference offers principled tools to tackle many critical problems with modern neural networks such as poor calibration and generalization, and data inefficiency. However,…
BibleTTS: a large, high-fidelity, multilingual, and uniquely African speech corpus
Josh Meyer, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Edresson Casanova +16
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 sp…
A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way! Leveraging Pre-trained Models for African News Translation
David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, Angela Fan +42
Recent advances in the pre-training of language models leverage large-scale datasets to create multilingual models. However, low-resource languages are mostly left out in these dat…
MMTAfrica: Multilingual Machine Translation for African Languages
Chris C. Emezue, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou
In this paper, we focus on the task of multilingual machine translation for African languages and describe our contribution in the 2021 WMT Shared Task: Large-Scale Multilingual Ma…
Bayesian Structure Learning with Generative Flow Networks
Tristan Deleu, António Góis, Chris Emezue +4
In Bayesian structure learning, we are interested in inferring a distribution over the directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure of Bayesian networks, from data. Defining such a distr…
Documenting Geographically and Contextually Diverse Data Sources: The BigScience Catalogue of Language Data and Resources
Angelina McMillan-Major, Zaid Alyafeai, Stella Biderman +15
In recent years, large-scale data collection efforts have prioritized the amount of data collected in order to improve the modeling capabilities of large language models. This prio…
NaijaSenti: A Nigerian Twitter Sentiment Corpus for Multilingual Sentiment Analysis
Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Sebastian Ruder +9
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-an…
The GEM Benchmark: Natural Language Generation, its Evaluation and Metrics
Sebastian Gehrmann, Tosin Adewumi, Karmanya Aggarwal +53
We introduce GEM, a living benchmark for natural language Generation (NLG), its Evaluation, and Metrics. Measuring progress in NLG relies on a constantly evolving ecosystem of auto…
Crowdsourced Phrase-Based Tokenization for Low-Resourced Neural Machine Translation: The Case of Fon Language
Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Chris C. Emezue
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 f…
OkwuGbé: End-to-End Speech Recognition for Fon and Igbo
Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Chris C. Emezue
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…
MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African Languages
David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Jade Abbott, Graham Neubig +58
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 en…
Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languages
Wilhelmina Nekoto, Vukosi Marivate, Tshinondiwa Matsila +45
Research in NLP lacks geographic diversity, and the question of how NLP can be scaled to low-resourced languages has not yet been adequately solved. "Low-resourced"-ness is a compl…
Lanfrica: A Participatory Approach to Documenting Machine Translation Research on African Languages
Chris C. Emezue, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou
Over the years, there have been campaigns to include the African languages in the growing research on machine translation (MT) in particular, and natural language processing (NLP)…