Yonas Chanie

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.

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

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 has become increasingly challenging. In this work, we explore LLM evaluation challenges for low-resource language understanding and introduce \proverbeval, LLM evaluation benchmark for low-resource languages, focusing on low-resource language understanding in culture-specific scenarios. We benchmark various LLMs and explore factors that create variability in the benchmarking process. We observed performance variances of up to 50\%, depending on the order in which answer choices were presented in multiple-choice tasks. Native language proverb descriptions significantly improve tasks such as proverb generation, contributing to improved outcomes. Additionally, monolingual evaluations consistently outperformed their cross-lingual counterparts in generation tasks. We argue that special attention must be given to the order of choices, the choice of prompt language, task variability, and generation tasks when creating LLM evaluation benchmarks. Evaluation data available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/israel/ProverbEval, evaluation code https://github.com/EthioNLP/EthioProverbEval.

Moayad Elamin, Muhammad Omer, Yonas Chanie et al.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are a crucial technology that is used today to design a wide variety of applications, most notably, smart assistants, such as Alexa. ASR systems are essentially dialogue systems that employ Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) to extract meaningful information from speech. The main challenge with designing such systems is that they require a huge amount of labeled clean data to perform competitively, such data is extremely hard to collect and annotate to respective SLU tasks, furthermore, when designing such systems for low resource languages, where data is extremely limited, the severity of the problem intensifies. In this paper, we focus on a fairly popular SLU task, that is, Intent Classification while working with a low resource language, namely, Flemish. Intent Classification is a task concerned with understanding the intents of the user interacting with the system. We build on existing light models for intent classification in Flemish, and our main contribution is applying different augmentation techniques on two levels -- the voice level, and the phonetic transcripts level -- to the existing models to counter the problem of scarce labeled data in low-resource languages. We find that our data augmentation techniques, on both levels, have improved the model performance on a number of tasks.