Walelign Tewabe Sewunetie

Badr M. Abdullah, Israel Abebe Azime, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja et al.

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.

Israel Abebe Azime, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Tadesse Destaw Belay et al.

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.

Kedir Yassin Hussen, Walelign Tewabe Sewunetie, Abinew Ali Ayele et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming Natural Language Processing (NLP), but their benefits are largely absent for Africa's 2,000 low-resource languages. This paper comparatively analyzes African language coverage across six LLMs, eight Small Language Models (SLMs), and six Specialized SLMs (SSLMs). The evaluation covers language coverage, training sets, technical limitations, script problems, and language modelling roadmaps. The work identifies 42 supported African languages and 23 available public data sets, and it shows a big gap where four languages (Amharic, Swahili, Afrikaans, and Malagasy) are always treated while there is over 98\% of unsupported African languages. Moreover, the review shows that just Latin, Arabic, and Ge'ez scripts are identified while 20 active scripts are neglected. Some of the primary challenges are lack of data, tokenization biases, computational costs being very high, and evaluation issues. These issues demand language standardization, corpus development by the community, and effective adaptation methods for African languages.

Tyler A. Chang, Catherine Arnett, Abdelrahman Eldesokey et al. · uw

To date, there exist almost no culturally-specific evaluation benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) that cover a large number of languages and cultures. In this paper, we present Global PIQA, a participatory commonsense reasoning benchmark for over 100 languages, constructed by hand by 335 researchers from 65 countries around the world. The 116 language varieties in Global PIQA cover five continents, 14 language families, and 23 writing systems. In the non-parallel split of Global PIQA, over 50% of examples reference local foods, customs, traditions, or other culturally-specific elements. We find that state-of-the-art LLMs perform well on Global PIQA in aggregate, but they exhibit weaker performance in lower-resource languages (up to a 37% accuracy gap, despite random chance at 50%). Open models generally perform worse than proprietary models. Global PIQA highlights that in many languages and cultures, everyday knowledge remains an area for improvement, alongside more widely-discussed capabilities such as complex reasoning and expert knowledge. Beyond its uses for LLM evaluation, we hope that Global PIQA provides a glimpse into the wide diversity of cultures in which human language is embedded.