15 citations · 47 across the 32 of their papers we have counts for
34 papers
AfrIFact: Cultural Information Retrieval, Evidence Extraction and Fact Checking for African Languages
Israel Abebe Azime, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, Crystina Zhang +16
Assessing the veracity of a claim made online is a complex and important task with real-world implications. When these claims are directed at communities with limited access to inf…
Ethio-ASR: Joint Multilingual Speech Recognition and Language Identification for Ethiopian Languages
Badr M. Abdullah, Israel Abebe Azime, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja +14
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, an…
Afri-MCQA: Multimodal Cultural Question Answering for African Languages
Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Srija Anand, Emilio Villa-Cueva +16
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 b…
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…
Evaluation Sheet for Deep Research: A Use Case for Academic Survey Writing
Israel Abebe Azime, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja
Large Language Models (LLMs) powered with argentic capabilities are able to do knowledge-intensive tasks without human involvement. A prime example of this tool is Deep research wi…
Bilingual Word Level Language Identification for Omotic Languages
Mesay Gemeda Yigezu, Girma Yohannis Bade, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja +3
Language identification is the task of determining the languages for a given text. In many real world scenarios, text may contain more than one language, particularly in multilingu…
A Case Against Implicit Standards: Homophone Normalization in Machine Translation for Languages that use the Ge'ez Script
Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Henok Biadglign Ademtew +4
Homophone normalization, where characters that have the same sound in a writing script are mapped to one character, is a pre-processing step applied in Amharic Natural Language Pro…
Explainable AI: XAI-Guided Context-Aware Data Augmentation
Melkamu Abay Mersha, Mesay Gemeda Yigezu, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja +4
Explainable AI (XAI) has emerged as a powerful tool for improving the performance of AI models, going beyond providing model transparency and interpretability. The scarcity of labe…
CaMMT: Benchmarking Culturally Aware Multimodal Machine Translation
Emilio Villa-Cueva, Sholpan Bolatzhanova, Diana Turmakhan +32
Translating cultural content poses challenges for machine translation systems due to the differences in conceptualizations between cultures, where language alone may fail to convey…
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…
ProverbEval: Exploring LLM Evaluation Challenges for Low-resource Language Understanding
Israel Abebe Azime, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Tadesse Destaw Belay +11
With the rapid development of evaluation datasets to assess LLMs understanding across a wide range of subjects and domains, identifying a suitable language understanding benchmark…
The Zeno's Paradox of `Low-Resource' Languages
Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Benjamin Rosman +2
The disparity in the languages commonly studied in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is typically reflected by referring to languages as low vs high-resourced. However, there is li…
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…
CVQA: Culturally-diverse Multilingual Visual Question Answering Benchmark
David Romero, Chenyang Lyu, Haryo Akbarianto Wibowo +73
Visual Question Answering (VQA) is an important task in multimodal AI, and it is often used to test the ability of vision-language models to understand and reason on knowledge pres…
NLP Progress in Indigenous Latin American Languages
Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Fazlourrahman Balouchzahi, Sabur Butt +4
The paper focuses on the marginalization of indigenous language communities in the face of rapid technological advancements. We highlight the cultural richness of these languages a…
EthioMT: Parallel Corpus for Low-resource Ethiopian Languages
Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Olga Kolesnikova, Alexander Gelbukh +1
Recent research in natural language processing (NLP) has achieved impressive performance in tasks such as machine translation (MT), news classification, and question-answering in h…
EthioLLM: Multilingual Large Language Models for Ethiopian Languages with Task Evaluation
Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Israel Abebe Azime, Tadesse Destaw Belay +10
Large language models (LLMs) have gained popularity recently due to their outstanding performance in various downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, low-resour…
Walia-LLM: Enhancing Amharic-LLaMA by Integrating Task-Specific and Generative Datasets
Israel Abebe Azime, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Tadesse Destaw Belay +6
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…
First Attempt at Building Parallel Corpora for Machine Translation of Northeast India's Very Low-Resource Languages
Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Melkamu Mersha, Ananya Kalita +2
This paper presents the creation of initial bilingual corpora for thirteen very low-resource languages of India, all from Northeast India. It also presents the results of initial t…
The Less the Merrier? Investigating Language Representation in Multilingual Models
Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Jugal Kalita
Multilingual Language Models offer a way to incorporate multiple languages in one model and utilize cross-language transfer learning to improve performance for different Natural La…
AfriSpeech-200: Pan-African Accented Speech Dataset for Clinical and General Domain ASR
Tobi Olatunji, Tejumade Afonja, Aditya Yadavalli +8
Africa has a very low doctor-to-patient ratio. At very busy clinics, doctors could see 30+ patients per day -- a heavy patient burden compared with developed countries -- but produ…
Automatic Translation of Hate Speech to Non-hate Speech in Social Media Texts
Yevhen Kostiuk, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Grigori Sidorov +1
In this paper, we investigate the issue of hate speech by presenting a novel task of translating hate speech into non-hate speech text while preserving its meaning. As a case study…
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…
Enhancing Translation for Indigenous Languages: Experiments with Multilingual Models
Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Olga Kolesnikova +3
This paper describes CIC NLP's submission to the AmericasNLP 2023 Shared Task on machine translation systems for indigenous languages of the Americas. We present the system descrip…