AfriSpeech-200: Pan-African Accented Speech Dataset for Clinical and General Domain ASR

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 productivity tools such as clinical automatic speech recognition (ASR) are lacking for these overworked clinicians. However, clinical ASR is mature, even ubiquitous, in developed nations, and clinician-reported performance of commercial clinical ASR systems is generally satisfactory. Furthermore, the recent performance of general domain ASR is approaching human accuracy. However, several gaps exist. Several publications have highlighted racial bias with speech-to-text algorithms and performance on minority accents lags significantly. To our knowledge, there is no publicly available research or benchmark on accented African clinical ASR, and speech data is non-existent for the majority of African accents. We release AfriSpeech, 200hrs of Pan-African English speech, 67,577 clips from 2,463 unique speakers across 120 indigenous accents from 13 countries for clinical and general domain ASR, a benchmark test set, with publicly available pre-trained models with SOTA performance on the AfriSpeech benchmark.

FonMTL: Towards Multitask Learning for the Fon Language

The Fon language, spoken by an average 2 million of people, is a truly low-resourced African language, with a limited online presence, and existing datasets (just to name but a few). Multitask learning is a learning paradigm that aims to improve the generalization capacity of a model by sharing knowledge across different but related tasks: this could be prevalent in very data-scarce scenarios. In this paper, we present the first explorative approach to multitask learning, for model capabilities enhancement in Natural Language Processing for the Fon language. Specifically, we explore the tasks of Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Part of Speech Tagging (POS) for Fon. We leverage two language model heads as encoders to build shared representations for the inputs, and we use linear layers blocks for classification relative to each task. Our results on the NER and POS tasks for Fon, show competitive (or better) performances compared to several multilingual pretrained language models finetuned on single tasks. Additionally, we perform a few ablation studies to leverage the efficiency of two different loss combination strategies and find out that the equal loss weighting approach works best in our case. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/bonaventuredossou/multitask_fon.

Adapting Pretrained ASR Models to Low-resource Clinical Speech using Epistemic Uncertainty-based Data Selection

While there has been significant progress in ASR, African-accented clinical ASR has been understudied due to a lack of training datasets. Building robust ASR systems in this domain requires large amounts of annotated or labeled data, for a wide variety of linguistically and morphologically rich accents, which are expensive to create. Our study aims to address this problem by reducing annotation expenses through informative uncertainty-based data selection. We show that incorporating epistemic uncertainty into our adaptation rounds outperforms several baseline results, established using state-of-the-art (SOTA) ASR models, while reducing the required amount of labeled data, and hence reducing annotation costs. Our approach also improves out-of-distribution generalization for very low-resource accents, demonstrating the viability of our approach for building generalizable ASR models in the context of accented African clinical ASR, where training datasets are predominantly scarce.

AfriNames: Most ASR models "butcher" African Names

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 artist, initiating navigation to a specific location, or documenting a laboratory result for a patient. However, where named entities such as ``Ukachukwu`` (Igbo), ``Lakicia`` (Swahili), or ``Ingabire`` (Rwandan) are spoken, automatic speech recognition (ASR) models' performance degrades significantly, propagating errors to downstream systems. We model this problem as a distribution shift and demonstrate that such model bias can be mitigated through multilingual pre-training, intelligent data augmentation strategies to increase the representation of African-named entities, and fine-tuning multilingual ASR models on multiple African accents. The resulting fine-tuned models show an 81.5\% relative WER improvement compared with the baseline on samples with African-named entities.

MasakhaPOS: Part-of-Speech Tagging for Typologically Diverse African Languages

In this paper, we present MasakhaPOS, the largest part-of-speech (POS) dataset for 20 typologically diverse African languages. We discuss the challenges in annotating POS for these languages using the UD (universal dependencies) guidelines. We conducted extensive POS baseline experiments using conditional random field and several multilingual pre-trained language models. We applied various cross-lingual transfer models trained with data available in UD. Evaluating on the MasakhaPOS dataset, we show that choosing the best transfer language(s) in both single-source and multi-source setups greatly improves the POS tagging performance of the target languages, in particular when combined with cross-lingual parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods. Crucially, transferring knowledge from a language that matches the language family and morphosyntactic properties seems more effective for POS tagging in unseen languages.

AfriQA: Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering for African Languages

African languages have far less in-language content available digitally, making it challenging for question answering systems to satisfy the information needs of users. Cross-lingual open-retrieval question answering (XOR QA) systems -- those that retrieve answer content from other languages while serving people in their native language -- offer a means of filling this gap. To this end, we create AfriQA, the first cross-lingual QA dataset with a focus on African languages. AfriQA includes 12,000+ XOR QA examples across 10 African languages. While previous datasets have focused primarily on languages where cross-lingual QA augments coverage from the target language, AfriQA focuses on languages where cross-lingual answer content is the only high-coverage source of answer content. Because of this, we argue that African languages are one of the most important and realistic use cases for XOR QA. Our experiments demonstrate the poor performance of automatic translation and multilingual retrieval methods. Overall, AfriQA proves challenging for state-of-the-art QA models. We hope that the dataset enables the development of more equitable QA technology.

MasakhaNEWS: News Topic Classification for African languages

African languages are severely under-represented in NLP research due to lack of datasets covering several NLP tasks. While there are individual language specific datasets that are being expanded to different tasks, only a handful of NLP tasks (e.g. named entity recognition and machine translation) have standardized benchmark datasets covering several geographical and typologically-diverse African languages. In this paper, we develop MasakhaNEWS -- a new benchmark dataset for news topic classification covering 16 languages widely spoken in Africa. We provide an evaluation of baseline models by training classical machine learning models and fine-tuning several language models. Furthermore, we explore several alternatives to full fine-tuning of language models that are better suited for zero-shot and few-shot learning such as cross-lingual parameter-efficient fine-tuning (like MAD-X), pattern exploiting training (PET), prompting language models (like ChatGPT), and prompt-free sentence transformer fine-tuning (SetFit and Cohere Embedding API). Our evaluation in zero-shot setting shows the potential of prompting ChatGPT for news topic classification in low-resource African languages, achieving an average performance of 70 F1 points without leveraging additional supervision like MAD-X. In few-shot setting, we show that with as little as 10 examples per label, we achieved more than 90\% (i.e. 86.0 F1 points) of the performance of full supervised training (92.6 F1 points) leveraging the PET approach.

Adapting to the Low-Resource Double-Bind: Investigating Low-Compute Methods on Low-Resource African Languages

Many natural language processing (NLP) tasks make use of massively pre-trained language models, which are computationally expensive. However, access to high computational resources added to the issue of data scarcity of African languages constitutes a real barrier to research experiments on these languages. In this work, we explore the applicability of low-compute approaches such as language adapters in the context of this low-resource double-bind. We intend to answer the following question: do language adapters allow those who are doubly bound by data and compute to practically build useful models? Through fine-tuning experiments on African languages, we evaluate their effectiveness as cost-effective approaches to low-resource African NLP. Using solely free compute resources, our results show that language adapters achieve comparable performances to massive pre-trained language models which are heavy on computational resources. This opens the door to further experimentation and exploration on full-extent of language adapters capacities.

Pretrained Vision Models for Predicting High-Risk Breast Cancer Stage

Cancer is increasingly a global health issue. Seconding cardiovascular diseases, cancers are the second biggest cause of death in the world with millions of people succumbing to the disease every year. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) report, by the end of 2020, more than 7.8 million women have been diagnosed with breast cancer, making it the world's most prevalent cancer. In this paper, using the Nightingale Open Science dataset of digital pathology (breast biopsy) images, we leverage the capabilities of pre-trained computer vision models for the breast cancer stage prediction task. While individual models achieve decent performances, we find out that the predictions of an ensemble model are more efficient, and offer a winning solution\footnote{https://www.nightingalescience.org/updates/hbc1-results}. We also provide analyses of the results and explore pathways for better interpretability and generalization. Our code is open-source at \url{https://github.com/bonaventuredossou/nightingale_winning_solution}