Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Srija Anand, Emilio Villa-Cueva, Israel Abebe Azime, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, Muhidin A. Mohamed, Debela Desalegn Yadeta, Negasi Haile Abadi, Abigail Oppong, Nnaemeka Casmir Obiefuna, Idris Abdulmumin, Naome A Etori, Eric Peter Wairagala, Kanda Patrick Tshinu, Imanigirimbabazi Emmanuel, Gabofetswe Malema, Alham Fikri Aji, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Thamar Solorio. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Hao Yu, Tianyi Xu, Michael A. Hedderich, Wassim Hamidouche, Syed Waqas Zamir, David Ifeoluwa Adelani. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

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.

Traditional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) strategies for sequence-to-sequence tasks often train models to directly generate the target output. Recent work has shown that guiding models with intermediate steps—such as keywords, outlines, or reasoning chains—can significantly improve performance, coherence, and interpretability. However, these methods often depend on predefined intermediate formats and annotated data, limiting their scalability and generalizability. In this work, we introduce a task-agnostic framework that enables models to generate intermediate “warmup” sequences. These warmup sequences, serving as an initial state for subsequent generation, are optimized to enhance the probability of generating the target sequence without relying on external supervision or human-designed structures. Drawing inspiration from reinforcement learning principles, our method iteratively refines these intermediate steps to maximize their contribution to the final output, similar to reward-driven optimization in reinforcement learning with human feedback. Experimental results across tasks such as translation, summarization, and multi-choice question answering for logical reasoning show that our approach outperforms traditional SFT methods, and offers a scalable and flexible solution for sequence-to-sequence tasks.

Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Nedjma Ousidhoum, Idris Abdulmumin, Jan Philip Wahle, Terry Ruas, Meriem Beloucif, Christine de Kock, Nirmal Surange, Daniela Teodorescu, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Alham Fikri Aji, Felermino D. M. A. Ali, Ilseyar Alimova, Vladimir Araujo, Nikolay Babakov, Naomi Baes, Ana-Maria Bucur, Andiswa Bukula, Guanqun Cao, Rodrigo Tufiño, Rendi Chevi, Chiamaka Ijeoma Chukwuneke, Alexandra Ciobotaru, Daryna Dementieva, Murja Sani Gadanya, Robert Geislinger, Bela Gipp, Oumaima Hourrane, Oana Ignat, Falalu Ibrahim Lawan, Rooweither Mabuya, Rahmad Mahendra, Vukosi Marivate, Alexander Panchenko, Andrew Piper, Charles Henrique Porto Ferreira, Vitaly Protasov, Samuel Rutunda, Manish Shrivastava, Aura Cristina Udrea, Lilian Diana Awuor Wanzare, Sophie Wu, Florian Valentin Wunderlich, Hanif Muhammad Zhafran, Tianhui Zhang, Yi Zhou, Saif M. Mohammad. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Shivalika Singh, Angelika Romanou, Clémentine Fourrier, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Jian Gang Ngui, Daniel Vila-Suero, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Kelly Marchisio, Wei Qi Leong, Yosephine Susanto, Raymond Ng, Shayne Longpre, Sebastian Ruder, Wei-Yin Ko, Antoine Bosselut, Alice Oh, Andre Martins, Leshem Choshen, Daphne Ippolito, Enzo Ferrante, Marzieh Fadaee, Beyza Ermis, Sara Hooker. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Slot-filling and intent detection are well-established tasks in Conversational AI. However, current large-scale benchmarks for these tasks often exclude evaluations of low-resource languages and rely on translations from English benchmarks, thereby predominantly reflecting Western-centric concepts. In this paper, we introduce “INJONGO” - a multicultural, open-source benchmark dataset for 16 African languages with utterances generated by native speakers across diverse domains, including banking, travel, home, and dining. Through extensive experiments, we benchmark fine-tuning multilingual transformer models and prompting large language models (LLMs), and show the advantage of leveraging African-cultural utterances over Western-centric utterances for improving cross-lingual transfer from the English language. Experimental results reveal that current LLMs struggle with the slot-filling task, with GPT-4o achieving an average performance of 26 F1. In contrast, intent detection performance is notably better, with an average accuracy of 70.6%, though it still falls short of fine-tuning baselines. When compared to the English language, GPT-4o and fine-tuning baselines perform similarly on intent detection, achieving an accuracy of approximately 81%. Our findings suggest that LLMs performance is still behind for many low-resource African languages, and more work is needed to further improve their downstream performance.

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 and state-of-the-art open models such as Qwen 2 Audio and Gemma 327 B. 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.

Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, Israel Abebe Azime, Miaoran Zhang, Cristina España-Bonet, Rachel Bawden, Dawei Zhu, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Clement Oyeleke Odoje, Idris Akinade, Iffat Maab, Davis David, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Neo Putini, David O. Ademuyiwa, Andrew Caines, Dietrich Klakow. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2025.

With over 2,000 languages and potentially millions of speakers, Africa represents one of the richest linguistic regions in the world.Yet, this diversity is scarcely reflected in state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) systems and large language models (LLMs), which predominantly support a narrow set of high-resource languages.This exclusion not only limits the reach and utility of modern NLP technologies but also risks widening the digital divide across linguistic communities.Nevertheless, NLP research on African languages is active and growing.In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in this area, driven by several factors-including the creation of multilingual language resources, the rise of community-led initiatives, and increased support through funding programs.In this survey, we analyze 884 research papers on NLP for African languages published over the past five years, offering a comprehensive overview of recent progress across core tasks.We identify key trends shaping the field and conclude by outlining promising directions to foster more inclusive and sustainable NLP research for African languages.1 27,593 papers (All papers, except expert recommendations, were collected using keyword matching via the Semantic Scholar API.)

Senyu Li, Jiayi Wang, Felermino D. M. A. Ali, Colin Cherry, Daniel Deutsch, Eleftheria Briakou, Rui Sousa-Silva, Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Pontus Stenetorp, David Ifeoluwa Adelani. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2025.

Jiayi Wang, Yao Lu, Maurice Weber, Max Ryabinin, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Yihong Chen, Raphael Tang, Pontus Stenetorp. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2025.

David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Jessica Ojo, Israel Abebe Azime, Jian Yun Zhuang, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, Xuanli He, Millicent Ochieng, Sara Hooker, Andiswa Bukula, En-Shiun Annie Lee, Chiamaka Ijeoma Chukwuneke, Happy Buzaaba, Blessing Kudzaishe Sibanda, Godson Koffi Kalipe, Jonathan Mukiibi, Salomon Kabongo Kabenamualu, Foutse Yuehgoh, Mmasibidi Setaka, Lolwethu Ndolela, Nkiruka Odu, Rooweither Mabuya, Salomey Osei, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Sokhar Samb, Tadesse Kebede Guge, Tombekai Vangoni Sherman, Pontus Stenetorp. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Idris Abdulmumin, Abinew Ali Ayele, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Saminu Mohammad Aliyu, Paul Röttger, Abigail Oppong, Andiswa Bukula, Chiamaka Ijeoma Chukwuneke, Ebrahim Chekol Jibril, Elyas Abdi Ismail, Esubalew Alemneh, Hagos Tesfahun Gebremichael, Lukman Jibril Aliyu, Meriem Beloucif, Oumaima Hourrane, Rooweither Mabuya, Salomey Osei, Samuel Rutunda, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Tadesse Kebede Guge, Tesfa Tegegne Asfaw, Lilian Diana Awuor Wanzare, Nelson Odhiambo Onyango, Seid Muhie Yimam, Nedjma Ousidhoum. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Genta Indra Winata, Frederikus Hudi, Patrick Amadeus Irawan, David Anugraha, Rifki Afina Putri, Wang Yutong, Adam Nohejl, Ubaidillah Ariq Prathama, Nedjma Ousidhoum, Afifa Amriani, Anar Rzayev, Anirban Das, Ashmari Pramodya, Aulia Adila, Bryan Wilie, Candy Olivia Mawalim, Cheng Ching Lam, Daud Abolade, Emmanuele Chersoni, Enrico Santus, Fariz Ikhwantri, Garry Kuwanto, Hanyang Zhao, Haryo Akbarianto Wibowo, Holy Lovenia, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Jan Wira Gotama Putra, Junho Myung, Lucky Susanto, Maria Angelica Riera Machin, Marina Zhukova, Michael Anugraha, Muhammad Farid Adilazuarda, Natasha Christabelle Santosa, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Raj Dabre, Rio Alexander Audino, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Shi-Xiong Zhang, Stephanie Yulia Salim, Yi Zhou, Yinxuan Gui, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, En-Shiun Annie Lee, Shogo Okada, Ayu Purwarianti, Alham Fikri Aji, Taro Watanabe, Derry Tanti Wijaya, Alice Oh, Chong-Wah Ngo. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Low-resource languages often face challenges in acquiring high-quality language data due to the reliance on translation-based methods, which can introduce the translationese effect. This phenomenon results in translated sentences that lack fluency and naturalness in the target language. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for data collection by leveraging storyboards to elicit more fluent and natural sentences. Our method involves presenting native speakers with visual stimuli in the form of storyboards and collecting their descriptions without direct exposure to the source text. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation comparing our storyboard-based approach with traditional text translation-based methods in terms of accuracy and fluency. Human annotators and quantitative metrics were used to assess translation quality. The results indicate a preference for text translation in terms of accuracy, while our method demonstrates worse accuracy but better fluency in the language focused.

We introduce ÌròyìnSpeech corpus—a new dataset influenced by a desire to increase the amount of high quality, freely available, contemporary Yorùbá speech data that can be used for both Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) tasks. We curated about 23,000 text sentences from the news and creative writing domains with an open license i.e., CC-BY-4.0 and asked multiple speakers to record each sentence. To encourage more participatory approach to data creation, we provide 5 000 utterances from the curated sentences to the Mozilla Common Voice platform to crowd-source the recording and validation of Yorùbá speech data. In total, we created about 42 hours of speech data recorded by 80 volunteers in-house, and 6 hours validated recordings on Mozilla Common Voice platform. Our evaluation on TTS shows that we can create a good quality general domain single-speaker TTS model for Yorùbá with as little 5 hours of speech by leveraging an end-to-end VITS architecture. Similarly, for ASR, we obtained a WER of 21.5.

David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Hannah Liu, Xiaoyu Shen, Nikita Vassilyev, Jesujoba O. Alabi, Yanke Mao, Haonan Gao, En-Shiun Annie Lee. Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Orevaoghene Ahia, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Diana Abagyan, Hila Gonen, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Daud Abolade, Noah A. Smith, Yulia Tsvetkov. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2024.

Jiayi Wang, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Sweta Agrawal, Marek Masiak, Ricardo Rei, Eleftheria Briakou, Marine Carpuat, Xuanli He, Sofia Bourhim, Andiswa Bukula, Muhidin Mohamed, Temitayo Olatoye, Tosin Adewumi, Hamam Mokayed, Christine Mwase, Wangui Kimotho, Foutse Yuehgoh, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Jessica Ojo, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Salomey Osei, Abdul-Hakeem Omotayo, Chiamaka Chukwuneke, Perez Ogayo, Oumaima Hourrane, Salma El Anigri, Lolwethu Ndolela, Thabiso Mangwana, Shafie Abdi Mohamed, Hassan Ayinde, Oluwabusayo Olufunke Awoyomi, Lama Alkhaled, Sana Al-azzawi, Naome A. Etori, Millicent Ochieng, Clemencia Siro, Njoroge Kiragu, Eric Muchiri, Wangari Kimotho, Lyse Naomi Wamba Momo, Daud Abolade, Simbiat Ajao, Iyanuoluwa Shode, Ricky Macharm, Ruqayya Nasir Iro, Saheed S. Abdullahi, Stephen E. Moore, Bernard Opoku, Zainab Akinjobi, Abeeb Afolabi, Nnaemeka Obiefuna, Onyekachi Raphael Ogbu, Sam Ochieng’, Verrah Akinyi Otiende, Chinedu Emmanuel Mbonu, Sakayo Toadoum Sari, Yao Lu, Pontus Stenetorp. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Visual Question Answering~(VQA) is an important task in multimodal AI, which requires models to understand and reason on knowledge present in visual and textual data. However, most of the current VQA datasets and models are primarily focused on English and a few major world languages, with images that are Western-centric. While recent efforts have tried to increase the number of languages covered on VQA datasets, they still lack diversity in low-resource languages. More importantly, some datasets extend the text to other languages, either via translation or some other approaches, but usually keep the same images, resulting in narrow cultural representation. To address these limitations, we create CVQA, a new Culturally-diverse Multilingual Visual Question Answering benchmark dataset, designed to cover a rich set of languages and regions, where we engage native speakers and cultural experts in the data collection process. CVQA includes culturally-driven images and questions from across 28 countries in four continents, covering 26 languages with 11 scripts, providing a total of 9k questions. We benchmark several Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on CVQA, and we show that the dataset is challenging for the current state-of-the-art models. This benchmark will serve as a probing evaluation suite for assessing the cultural bias of multimodal models and hopefully encourage more research efforts towards increasing cultural awareness and linguistic diversity in this field.

Cheikh M. Bamba Dione, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Peter Nabende, Jesujoba Alabi, Thapelo Sindane, Happy Buzaaba, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Chris Chinenye Emezue, Perez Ogayo, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Catherine Gitau, Derguene Mbaye, Jonathan Mukiibi, Blessing Sibanda, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Andiswa Bukula, Rooweither Mabuya, Allahsera Auguste Tapo, Edwin Munkoh-Buabeng, Victoire Memdjokam Koagne, Fatoumata Ouoba Kabore, Amelia Taylor, Godson Kalipe, Tebogo Macucwa, Vukosi Marivate, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Mboning Tchiaze Elvis, Ikechukwu Onyenwe, Gratien Atindogbe, Tolulope Adelani, Idris Akinade, Olanrewaju Samuel, Marien Nahimana, Théogène Musabeyezu, Emile Niyomutabazi, Ester Chimhenga, Kudzai Gotosa, Patrick Mizha, Apelete Agbolo, Seydou Traore, Chinedu Uchechukwu, Aliyu Yusuf, Muhammad Abdullahi, Dietrich Klakow. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2023.

Zheng Xin Yong, Hailey Schoelkopf, Niklas Muennighoff, Alham Fikri Aji, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Khalid Almubarak, M Saiful Bari, Lintang Sutawika, Jungo Kasai, Ahmed Baruwa, Genta Winata, Stella Biderman, Edward Raff, Dragomir Radev, Vassilina Nikoulina. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2023.

Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Idris Abdulmumin, Abinew Ayele, Nedjma Ousidhoum, David Adelani, Seid Yimam, Ibrahim Ahmad, Meriem Beloucif, Saif Mohammad, Sebastian Ruder, Oumaima Hourrane, Alipio Jorge, Pavel Brazdil, Felermino Ali, Davis David, Salomey Osei, Bello Shehu-Bello, Falalu Lawan, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Samuel Rutunda, Tadesse Belay, Wendimu Messelle, Hailu Balcha, Sisay Chala, Hagos Gebremichael, Bernard Opoku, Stephen Arthur. Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2023.

Akintunde Oladipo, Mofetoluwa Adeyemi, Orevaoghene Ahia, Abraham Owodunni, Odunayo Ogundepo, David Adelani, Jimmy Lin. Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2023.

David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Marek Masiak, Israel Abebe Azime, Jesujoba Alabi, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Christine Mwase, Odunayo Ogundepo, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Akintunde Oladipo, Doreen Nixdorf, Chris Chinenye Emezue, Sana Al-azzawi, Blessing Sibanda, Davis David, Lolwethu Ndolela, Jonathan Mukiibi, Tunde Ajayi, Tatiana Moteu, Brian Odhiambo, Abraham Owodunni, Nnaemeka Obiefuna, Muhidin Mohamed, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Teshome Mulugeta Ababu, Saheed Abdullahi Salahudeen, Mesay Gemeda Yigezu, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Idris Abdulmumin, Mahlet Taye, Oluwabusayo Awoyomi, Iyanuoluwa Shode, Tolulope Adelani, Habiba Abdulganiyu, Abdul-Hakeem Omotayo, Adetola Adeeko, Abeeb Afolabi, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Olanrewaju Samuel, Clemencia Siro, Wangari Kimotho, Onyekachi Ogbu, Chinedu Mbonu, Chiamaka Chukwuneke, Samuel Fanijo, Jessica Ojo, Oyinkansola Awosan, Tadesse Kebede, Toadoum Sari Sakayo, Pamela Nyatsine, Freedmore Sidume, Oreen Yousuf, Mardiyyah Oduwole, Kanda Tshinu, Ussen Kimanuka, Thina Diko, Siyanda Nxakama, Sinodos Nigusse, Abdulmejid Johar, Shafie Mohamed, Fuad Mire Hassan, Moges Ahmed Mehamed, Evrard Ngabire, Jules Jules, Ivan Ssenkungu, Pontus Stenetorp. Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2023.

Pretrained language models (PLMs) are today the primary model for natural language processing. Despite their impressive downstream performance, it can be difficult to apply PLMs to new languages, a barrier to making their capabilities universally accessible. While prior work has shown it possible to address this issue by learning a new embedding layer for the new language, doing so is both data and compute inefficient. We propose to use an active forgetting mechanism during pretraining, as a simple way of creating PLMs that can quickly adapt to new languages. Concretely, by resetting the embedding layer every K updates during pretraining, we encourage the PLM to improve its ability of learning new embeddings within limited number of updates, similar to a meta-learning effect. Experiments with RoBERTa show that models pretrained with our forgetting mechanism not only demonstrate faster convergence during language adaptation, but also outperform standard ones in a low-data regime, particularly for languages that are distant from English. Code will be available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/language-model-plasticity.

Multilingual pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on several downstream tasks for both high-resourced and low-resourced languages. However, there is still a large performance drop for languages unseen during pre-training, especially African languages. One of the most effective approaches to adapt to a new language is language adaptive fine-tuning (LAFT) — fine-tuning a multilingual PLM on monolingual texts of a language using the pre-training objective. However, adapting to target language individually takes large disk space and limits the cross-lingual transfer abilities of the resulting models because they have been specialized for a single language. In this paper, we perform multilingual adaptive fine-tuning on 17 most-resourced African languages and three other high-resource languages widely spoken on the African continent to encourage cross-lingual transfer learning. To further specialize the multilingual PLM, we removed vocabulary tokens from the embedding layer that corresponds to non-African writing scripts before MAFT, thus reducing the model size by around 50%. Our evaluation on two multilingual PLMs (AfriBERTa and XLM-R) and three NLP tasks (NER, news topic classification, and sentiment classification) shows that our approach is competitive to applying LAFT on individual languages while requiring significantly less disk space. Additionally, we show that our adapted PLM also improves the zero-shot cross-lingual transfer abilities of parameter efficient fine-tuning methods.

The surging demand for multilingual dialogue systems often requires a costly labeling process for each language addition. For low resource languages, human annotators are continuously tasked with the adaptation of resource-rich language utterances for each new domain. However, this prohibitive and impractical process can often be a bottleneck for low resource languages that are still without proper translation systems nor parallel corpus. In particular, it is difficult to obtain task-specific low resource language annotations for the English-derived creoles (e.g. Nigerian and Cameroonian Pidgin). To address this issue, we utilize the pretrained language models i.e. BART which has shown great potential in language generation/understanding – we propose to finetune the BART model to generate utterances in Pidgin by leveraging the proximity of the source and target languages, and utilizing positive and negative examples in constrastive training objectives. We collected and released the first parallel Pidgin-English conversation corpus in two dialogue domains and showed that this simple and effective technique is suffice to yield impressive results for English-to-Pidgin generation, which are two closely-related languages.

David Adelani, Graham Neubig, Sebastian Ruder, Shruti Rijhwani, Michael Beukman, Chester Palen-Michel, Constantine Lignos, Jesujoba Alabi, Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Peter Nabende, Cheikh M. Bamba Dione, Andiswa Bukula, Rooweither Mabuya, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Blessing Sibanda, Happy Buzaaba, Jonathan Mukiibi, Godson Kalipe, Derguene Mbaye, Amelia Taylor, Fatoumata Kabore, Chris Chinenye Emezue, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Perez Ogayo, Catherine Gitau, Edwin Munkoh-Buabeng, Victoire Memdjokam Koagne, Allahsera Auguste Tapo, Tebogo Macucwa, Vukosi Marivate, Mboning Tchiaze Elvis, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Tosin Adewumi, Orevaoghene Ahia, Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende, Neo Lerato Mokono, Ignatius Ezeani, Chiamaka Chukwuneke, Mofetoluwa Oluwaseun Adeyemi, Gilles Quentin Hacheme, Idris Abdulmumin, Odunayo Ogundepo, Oreen Yousuf, Tatiana Moteu, Dietrich Klakow. Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2022.

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.

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 Yorùbá—consisting of around 30,000 annotated tweets per language, 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 range of pre-trained models and transfer strategies on the dataset. We find that language-specific models and language-adaptive fine-tuning generally perform best. We release the datasets, trained models, sentiment lexicons, and code to incentivize research on sentiment analysis in under-represented languages.

David Adelani, Jesujoba Alabi, Angela Fan, Julia Kreutzer, Xiaoyu Shen, Machel Reid, Dana Ruiter, Dietrich Klakow, Peter Nabende, Ernie Chang, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Freshia Sackey, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Chris Emezue, Colin Leong, Michael Beukman, Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Guyo Jarso, Oreen Yousuf, Andre Niyongabo Rubungo, Gilles Hacheme, Eric Peter Wairagala, Muhammad Umair Nasir, Benjamin Ajibade, Tunde Ajayi, Yvonne Gitau, Jade Abbott, Mohamed Ahmed, Millicent Ochieng, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Perez Ogayo, Jonathan Mukiibi, Fatoumata Ouoba Kabore, Godson Kalipe, Derguene Mbaye, Allahsera Auguste Tapo, Victoire Memdjokam Koagne, Edwin Munkoh-Buabeng, Valencia Wagner, Idris Abdulmumin, Ayodele Awokoya, Happy Buzaaba, Blessing Sibanda, Andiswa Bukula, Sam Manthalu. Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2022.

Miaoran Zhang, Marius Mosbach, David Adelani, Michael Hedderich, Dietrich Klakow. Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2022.

As language models grow ever larger, the need for large-scale high-quality text datasets has never been more pressing, especially in multilingual settings. The BigScience workshop, a 1-year international and multidisciplinary initiative, was formed with the goal of researching and training large language models as a values-driven undertaking, putting issues of ethics, harm, and governance in the foreground. This paper documents the data creation and curation efforts undertaken by BigScience to assemble the Responsible Open-science Open-collaboration Text Sources (ROOTS) corpus, a 1.6TB dataset spanning 59 languages that was used to train the 176-billion-parameter BigScience Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual (BLOOM) language model. We further release a large initial subset of the corpus and analyses thereof, and hope to empower large-scale monolingual and multilingual modeling projects with both the data and the processing tools, as well as stimulate research around this large multilingual corpus.

Documents as short as a single sentence may inadvertently reveal sensitive information about their authors, including e.g.their gender or ethnicity.Style transfer is an effective way of transforming texts in order to remove any information that enables author profiling.However, for a number of current state-of-theart approaches the improved privacy is accompanied by an undesirable drop in the downstream utility of the transformed data.In this paper, we propose a simple, zero-shot way to effectively lower the risk of author profiling through multilingual back-translation using off-the-shelf translation models.We compare our models with five representative text style transfer models on three datasets across different domains.Results from both an automatic and a human evaluation show that our approach achieves the best overall performance while requiring no training data.We are able to lower the adversarial prediction of gender and race by up to 22% while retaining 95% of the original utility on downstream tasks.

Massively multilingual machine translation (MT) has shown impressive capabilities and including zero and few-shot translation between low-resource language pairs. However and 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 and we present MENYO-20k and the first multi-domain parallel corpus with a especially curated orthography for Yoruba–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 and we also analyze the effect of diacritics and a major characteristic of Yoruba and in the training data. We investigate how and when this training condition affects the final quality of a translation and its understandability.Our models outperform massively multilingual models such as Google (+8.7 BLEU) and Facebook M2M (+9.1) when translating to Yoruba and setting a high quality benchmark for future research.

Abstract We take a step towards addressing the under- representation of the African continent in NLP research by bringing together different stakeholders to create the first large, publicly available, high-quality dataset for named entity recognition (NER) in ten African languages. We detail the characteristics of these languages to help researchers and practitioners better understand the challenges they pose for NER tasks. We analyze our datasets and conduct an extensive empirical evaluation of state- of-the-art methods across both supervised and transfer learning settings. Finally, we release the data, code, and models to inspire future research on African NLP.1

Multilingual transformer models like mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa have obtained great improvements for many NLP tasks on a variety of languages.However, recent works also showed that results from high-resource languages could not be easily transferred to realistic, low-resource scenarios.In this work, we study trends in performance for different amounts of available resources for the three African languages Hausa, isiXhosa and Yorùbá on both NER and topic classification.We show that in combination with transfer learning or distant supervision, these models can achieve with as little as 10 or 100 labeled sentences the same performance as baselines with much more supervised training data.However, we also find settings where this does not hold.Our discussions and additional experiments on assumptions such as time and hardware restrictions highlight challenges and opportunities in low-resource learning.

Machine Learning approaches to Natural Language Processing tasks benefit from a comprehensive collection of real-life user data. At the same time, there is a clear need for protecting the privacy of the users whose data is collected and processed. For text collections, such as, e.g., transcripts of voice interactions or patient records, replacing sensitive parts with benign alternatives can provide de-identification. However, how much privacy is actually guaranteed by such text transformations, and are the resulting texts still useful for machine learning? In this paper, we derive formal privacy guarantees for general text transformation-based de-identification methods on the basis of Differential Privacy. We also measure the effect that different ways of masking private information in dialog transcripts have on a subsequent machine learning task. To this end, we formulate different masking strategies and compare their privacy-utility trade-offs. In particular, we compare a simple redact approach with more sophisticated word-by-word replacement using deep learning models on multiple natural language understanding tasks like named entity recognition, intent detection, and dialog act classification. We find that only word-by-word replacement is robust against performance drops in various tasks.

The success of several architectures to learn semantic representations from unannotated text and the availability of these kind of texts in online multilingual resources such as Wikipedia has facilitated the massive and automatic creation of resources for multiple languages. The evaluation of such resources is usually done for the high-resourced languages, where one has a smorgasbord of tasks and test sets to evaluate on. For low-resourced languages, the evaluation is more difficult and normally ignored, with the hope that the impressive capability of deep learning architectures to learn (multilingual) representations in the high-resourced setting holds in the low-resourced setting too. In this paper we focus on two African languages, Yorùbá and Twi, and compare the word embeddings obtained in this way, with word embeddings obtained from curated corpora and a language-dependent processing. We analyse the noise in the publicly available corpora, collect high quality and noisy data for the two languages and quantify the improvements that depend not only on the amount of data but on the quality too. We also use different architectures that learn word representations both from surface forms and characters to further exploit all the available information which showed to be important for these languages. For the evaluation, we manually translate the wordsim-353 word pairs dataset from English into Yorùbá and Twi. We extend the analysis to contextual word embeddings and evaluate multilingual BERT on a named entity recognition task. For this, we annotate with named entities the Global Voices corpus for Yorùbá. As output of the work, we provide corpora, embeddings and the test suits for both languages.

Social media provide access to behavioural data at an unprecedented scale and granularity. However, using these data to understand phenomena in a broader population is difficult due to their non-representativeness and the bias of statistical inference tools towards dominant languages and groups. While demographic attribute inference could be used to mitigate such bias, current techniques are almost entirely monolingual and fail to work in a global environment. We address these challenges by combining multilingual demographic inference with post-stratification to create a more representative population sample. To learn demographic attributes, we create a new multimodal deep neural architecture for joint classification of age, gender, and organization-status of social media users that operates in 32 languages. This method substantially outperforms current state of the art while also reducing algorithmic bias. To correct for sampling biases, we propose fully interpretable multilevel regression methods that estimate inclusion probabilities from inferred joint population counts and ground-truth population counts.