25 citations · 55 across the 38 of their papers we have counts for
41 papers
Tone-Conditioned Curriculum Learning for Low-Resource Bantu Speech Recognition
Kesego Mokgosi, Vukosi Marivate, Sitwala Mundia +3
Southern Bantu languages are spoken by over 80 million people, yet current foundation ASR models still produce zero-shot WER above 100%, which limits practical use in education and…
The Annotation Scarcity Paradox in Low-Resource NLP Evaluation: A Decade of Acceleration and Emerging Constraints
Vukosi Marivate
Over the past decade, low-resource natural language processing (NLP) has experienced explosive growth, propelled by cross-lingual transfer, massively multilingual models, and the r…
AfriScience-MT: Towards Decolonizing Science in Africa through Text Translation
Idris Abdulmumin, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad +11
The dominance of colonial languages in African education and scientific communication limits how hundreds of millions of speakers of African languages access and produce scientific…
Temporal Simultaneity Predicts Annotation Quality in Sentiment Corpora
Idris Abdulmumin, Mokgadi Penelope Matloga, Tadesse Destaw Belay +5
Annotation quality is difficult to sustain when campaigns span weeks or months with small annotator pools. We present a Setswana sentiment dataset of 3,565 tweets annotated by thre…
CommonLID: Re-evaluating State-of-the-Art Language Identification Performance on Web Data
Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Laurie Burchell, Catherine Arnett +94
Language identification (LID) is a fundamental step in curating multilingual corpora. However, LID models still perform poorly for many languages, especially on the noisy and heter…
Swivuriso: The South African Next Voices Multilingual Speech Dataset
Vukosi Marivate, Kayode Olaleye, Sitwala Mundia +19
This paper introduces Swivuriso, a 3000-hour multilingual speech dataset developed as part of the African Next Voices project, to support the development and benchmarking of automa…
The Rise of AfricaNLP: A Survey of Contributions, Contributors, Community Impact, and Bibliometric Analysis
Tadesse Destaw Belay, Kedir Yassin Hussen, Sukairaj Hafiz Imam +11
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is undergoing constant transformation, as Large Language Models (LLMs) are driving daily breakthroughs in research and practice. In this regard, t…
Mafoko: Structuring and Building Open Multilingual Terminologies for South African NLP
Vukosi Marivate, Isheanesu Dzingirai, Fiskani Banda +9
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 aca…
HausaNLP: Current Status, Challenges and Future Directions for Hausa Natural Language Processing
Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Idris Abdulmumin +9
Hausa Natural Language Processing (NLP) has gained increasing attention in recent years, yet remains understudied as a low-resource language despite having over 120 million first-l…
HausaNLP at SemEval-2025 Task 2: Entity-Aware Fine-tuning vs. Prompt Engineering in Entity-Aware Machine Translation
Abdulhamid Abubakar, Hamidatu Abdulkadir, Ibrahim Rabiu Abdullahi +9
This paper presents our findings for SemEval 2025 Task 2, a shared task on entity-aware machine translation (EA-MT). The goal of this task is to develop translation models that can…
AfroXLMR-Comet: Multilingual Knowledge Distillation with Attention Matching for Low-Resource languages
Joshua Sakthivel Raju, Sanjay S, Jaskaran Singh Walia +2
Language model compression through knowledge distillation has emerged as a promising approach for deploying large language models in resource-constrained environments. However, exi…
MAGE: Multi-Head Attention Guided Embeddings for Low Resource Sentiment Classification
Varun Vashisht, Samar Singh, Mihir Konduskar +2
Due to the lack of quality data for low-resource Bantu languages, significant challenges are presented in text classification and other practical implementations. In this paper, we…
The Esethu Framework: Reimagining Sustainable Dataset Governance and Curation for Low-Resource Languages
Jenalea Rajab, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Everlyn Asiko Chimoto +12
This paper presents the Esethu Framework, a sustainable data curation framework specifically designed to empower local communities and ensure equitable benefit-sharing from their l…
BRIGHTER: BRIdging the Gap in Human-Annotated Textual Emotion Recognition Datasets for 28 Languages
Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Nedjma Ousidhoum, Idris Abdulmumin +45
People worldwide use language in subtle and complex ways to express emotions. Although emotion recognition--an umbrella term for several NLP tasks--impacts various applications wit…
Analysing Public Transport User Sentiment on Low Resource Multilingual Data
Rozina L. Myoya, Vukosi Marivate, Idris Abdulmumin
Public transport systems in many Sub-Saharan countries often receive less attention compared to other sectors, underscoring the need for innovative solutions to improve the Quality…
AI and the Future of Work in Africa White Paper
Jacki O'Neill, Vukosi Marivate, Barbara Glover +71
This white paper is the output of a multidisciplinary workshop in Nairobi (Nov 2023). Led by a cross-organisational team including Microsoft Research, NEPAD, Lelapa AI, and Univers…
From N-grams to Pre-trained Multilingual Models For Language Identification
Thapelo Sindane, Vukosi Marivate
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 mod…
Correcting FLORES Evaluation Dataset for Four African Languages
Idris Abdulmumin, Sthembiso Mkhwanazi, Mahlatse S. Mbooi +7
This paper describes the corrections made to the FLORES evaluation (dev and devtest) dataset for four African languages, namely Hausa, Northern Sotho (Sepedi), Xitsonga, and isiZul…
Cross-lingual transfer of multilingual models on low resource African Languages
Harish Thangaraj, Ananya Chenat, Jaskaran Singh Walia +1
Large multilingual models have significantly advanced natural language processing (NLP) research. However, their high resource demands and potential biases from diverse data source…
InkubaLM: A small language model for low-resource African languages
Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Jessica Ojo +8
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 s…
Pula: Training Large Language Models for Setswana
Nathan Brown, Vukosi Marivate
In this work we present Pula, a suite of bilingual language models proficient in both Setswana and English. Leveraging recent advancements in data availability and efficient fine-t…
Prompting Towards Alleviating Code-Switched Data Scarcity in Under-Resourced Languages with GPT as a Pivot
Michelle Terblanche, Kayode Olaleye, Vukosi Marivate
Many multilingual communities, including numerous in Africa, frequently engage in code-switching during conversations. This behaviour stresses the need for natural language process…
PuoBERTa: Training and evaluation of a curated language model for Setswana
Vukosi Marivate, Moseli Mots'Oehli, Valencia Wagner +2
Natural language processing (NLP) has made significant progress for well-resourced languages such as English but lagged behind for low-resource languages like Setswana. This paper…
Investigating the Efficacy of Large Language Models in Reflective Assessment Methods through Chain of Thoughts Prompting
Baphumelele Masikisiki, Vukosi Marivate, Yvette Hlope
Large Language Models, such as Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (aka. GPT-3), have been developed to understand language through the analysis of extensive text data, allowing t…