MyCulture: Exploring Malaysia's Diverse Culture under Low-Resource Language Constraints

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit cultural biases due to training data dominated by high-resource languages like English and Chinese. This poses challenges for accurately representing and evaluating diverse cultural contexts, particularly in low-resource language settings. To address this, we introduce MyCulture, a benchmark designed to comprehensively evaluate LLMs on Malaysian culture across six pillars: arts, attire, customs, entertainment, food, and religion presented in Bahasa Melayu. Unlike conventional benchmarks, MyCulture employs a novel open-ended multiple-choice question format without predefined options, thereby reducing guessing and mitigating format bias. We provide a theoretical justification for the effectiveness of this open-ended structure in improving both fairness and discriminative power. Furthermore, we analyze structural bias by comparing model performance on structured versus free-form outputs, and assess language bias through multilingual prompt variations. Our evaluation across a range of regional and international LLMs reveals significant disparities in cultural comprehension, highlighting the urgent need for culturally grounded and linguistically inclusive benchmarks in the development and assessment of LLMs.

Improving Multilingual Social Media Insights: Aspect-based Comment Analysis

The inherent nature of social media posts, characterized by the freedom of language use with a disjointed array of diverse opinions and topics, poses significant challenges to downstream NLP tasks such as comment clustering, comment summarization, and social media opinion analysis. To address this, we propose a granular level of identifying and generating aspect terms from individual comments to guide model attention. Specifically, we leverage multilingual large language models with supervised fine-tuning for comment aspect term generation (CAT-G), further aligning the model's predictions with human expectations through DPO. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in enhancing the comprehension of social media discourse on two NLP tasks. Moreover, this paper contributes the first multilingual CAT-G test set on English, Chinese, Malay, and Bahasa Indonesian. As LLM capabilities vary among languages, this test set allows for a comparative analysis of performance across languages with varying levels of LLM proficiency.

Bahasa Harmony: A Comprehensive Dataset for Bahasa Text-to-Speech Synthesis with Discrete Codec Modeling of EnGen-TTS

This research introduces a comprehensive Bahasa text-to-speech (TTS) dataset and a novel TTS model, EnGen-TTS, designed to enhance the quality and versatility of synthetic speech in the Bahasa language. The dataset, spanning \textasciitilde55.0 hours and 52K audio recordings, integrates diverse textual sources, ensuring linguistic richness. A meticulous recording setup captures the nuances of Bahasa phonetics, employing professional equipment to ensure high-fidelity audio samples. Statistical analysis reveals the dataset's scale and diversity, laying the foundation for model training and evaluation. The proposed EnGen-TTS model performs better than established baselines, achieving a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of 4.45 $\pm$ 0.13. Additionally, our investigation on real-time factor and model size highlights EnGen-TTS as a compelling choice, with efficient performance. This research marks a significant advancement in Bahasa TTS technology, with implications for diverse language applications. Link to Generated Samples: \url{https://bahasa-harmony-comp.vercel.app/}

Indo LEGO-ABSA: A Multitask Generative Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis for Indonesian Language

Aspect-based sentiment analysis is a method in natural language processing aimed at identifying and understanding sentiments related to specific aspects of an entity. Aspects are words or phrases that represent an aspect or attribute of a particular entity. Previous research has utilized generative pre-trained language models to perform aspect-based sentiment analysis. LEGO-ABSA is one framework that has successfully employed generative pre-trained language models in aspect-based sentiment analysis, particularly in English. LEGO-ABSA uses a multitask learning and prompting approach to enhance model performance. However, the application of this approach has not been done in the context of Bahasa Indonesia. Therefore, this research aims to implement the multitask learning and prompting approach in aspect-based sentiment analysis for Bahasa Indonesia using generative pre-trained language models. In this study, the Indo LEGO-ABSA model is developed, which is an aspect-based sentiment analysis model utilizing generative pre-trained language models and trained with multitask learning and prompting. Indo LEGO-ABSA is trained with a hotel domain dataset in the Indonesian language. The obtained results include an f1-score of 79.55% for the Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction task, 86.09% for Unified Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis, 79.85% for Aspect Opinion Pair Extraction, 87.45% for Aspect Term Extraction, and 88.09% for Opinion Term Extraction. Indo LEGO-ABSA adopts the LEGO-ABSA framework that employs the T5 model, specifically mT5, by applying multitask learning to train all tasks within aspect-based sentiment analysis.

Performance Analysis of Transformer Based Models (BERT, ALBERT and RoBERTa) in Fake News Detection

Fake news is fake material in a news media format but is not processed properly by news agencies. The fake material can provoke or defame significant entities or individuals or potentially even for the personal interests of the creators, causing problems for society. Distinguishing fake news and real news is challenging due to limited of domain knowledge and time constraints. According to the survey, the top three areas most exposed to hoaxes and misinformation by residents are in Banten, DKI Jakarta and West Java. The model of transformers is referring to an approach in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in natural language processing utilizing the deep learning architectures. Transformers exercise a powerful attention mechanism to process text in parallel and produce rich and contextual word representations. A previous study indicates a superior performance of a transformer model known as BERT over and above non transformer approach. However, some studies suggest the performance can be improved with the use of improved BERT models known as ALBERT and RoBERTa. However, the modified BERT models are not well explored for detecting fake news in Bahasa Indonesia. In this research, we explore those transformer models and found that ALBERT outperformed other models with 87.6% accuracy, 86.9% precision, 86.9% F1-score, and 174.5 run-time (s/epoch) respectively. Source code available at: https://github.com/Shafna81/fakenewsdetection.git

Sejarah dan Perkembangan Teknik Natural Language Processing (NLP) Bahasa Indonesia: Tinjauan tentang sejarah, perkembangan teknologi, dan aplikasi NLP dalam bahasa Indonesia

This study provides an overview of the history of the development of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the context of the Indonesian language, with a focus on the basic technologies, methods, and practical applications that have been developed. This review covers developments in basic NLP technologies such as stemming, part-of-speech tagging, and related methods; practical applications in cross-language information retrieval systems, information extraction, and sentiment analysis; and methods and techniques used in Indonesian language NLP research, such as machine learning, statistics-based machine translation, and conflict-based approaches. This study also explores the application of NLP in Indonesian language industry and research and identifies challenges and opportunities in Indonesian language NLP research and development. Recommendations for future Indonesian language NLP research and development include developing more efficient methods and technologies, expanding NLP applications, increasing sustainability, further research into the potential of NLP, and promoting interdisciplinary collaboration. It is hoped that this review will help researchers, practitioners, and the government to understand the development of Indonesian language NLP and identify opportunities for further research and development.

Indonesian Text-to-Image Synthesis with Sentence-BERT and FastGAN

Currently, text-to-image synthesis uses text encoder and image generator architecture. Research on this topic is challenging. This is because of the domain gap between natural language and vision. Nowadays, most research on this topic only focuses on producing a photo-realistic image, but the other domain, in this case, is the language, which is less concentrated. A lot of the current research uses English as the input text. Besides, there are many languages around the world. Bahasa Indonesia, as the official language of Indonesia, is quite popular. This language has been taught in Philipines, Australia, and Japan. Translating or recreating a new dataset into another language with good quality will cost a lot. Research on this domain is necessary because we need to examine how the image generator performs in other languages besides generating photo-realistic images. To achieve this, we translate the CUB dataset into Bahasa using google translate and manually by humans. We use Sentence BERT as the text encoder and FastGAN as the image generator. FastGAN uses lots of skip excitation modules and auto-encoder to generate an image with resolution 512x512x3, which is twice as bigger as the current state-of-the-art model (Zhang, Xu, Li, Zhang, Wang, Huang and Metaxas, 2019). We also get 4.76 +- 0.43 and 46.401 on Inception Score and Fr\'echet inception distance, respectively, and comparable with the current English text-to-image generation models. The mean opinion score also gives as 3.22 out of 5, which means the generated image is acceptable by humans. Link to source code: https://github.com/share424/Indonesian-Text-to-Image-synthesis-with-Sentence-BERT-and-FastGAN

Cloud-based Automatic Speech Recognition Systems for Southeast Asian Languages

This paper provides an overall introduction of our Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems for Southeast Asian languages. As not much existing work has been carried out on such regional languages, a few difficulties should be addressed before building the systems: limitation on speech and text resources, lack of linguistic knowledge, etc. This work takes Bahasa Indonesia and Thai as examples to illustrate the strategies of collecting various resources required for building ASR systems.

Crossing the Linguistic Causeway: A Binational Approach for Translating Soundscape Attributes to Bahasa Melayu

Translation of perceptual descriptors such as the perceived affective quality attributes in the soundscape standard (ISO/TS 12913-2:2018) is an inherently intricate task, especially if the target language is used in multiple countries. Despite geographical proximity and a shared language of Bahasa Melayu (Standard Malay), differences in culture and language education policies between Singapore and Malaysia could invoke peculiarities in the affective appraisal of sounds. To generate provisional translations of the eight perceived affective attributes -- eventful, vibrant, pleasant, calm, uneventful, monotonous, annoying, and chaotic -- into Bahasa Melayu that is applicable in both Singapore and Malaysia, a binational expert-led approach supplemented by a quantitative evaluation framework was adopted. A set of preliminary translation candidates were developed via a four-stage process, firstly by a qualified translator, which was then vetted by linguistics experts, followed by examination via an experiential evaluation, and finally reviewed by the core research team. A total of 66 participants were then recruited cross-nationally to quantitatively evaluate the preliminary translation candidates. Of the eight attributes, cross-national differences were observed only in the translation of annoying. For instance, "menjengkelkan" was found to be significantly less understood in Singapore than in Malaysia, as well as less understandable than "membingitkan" within Singapore. Results of the quantitative evaluation also revealed the imperfect nature of foreign language translations for perceptual descriptors, which suggests a possibility for exploring corrective measures.

Indonesia's Fake News Detection using Transformer Network

Fake news is a problem faced by society in this era. It is not rare for fake news to cause provocation and problem for the people. Indonesia, as a country with the 4th largest population, has a problem in dealing with fake news. More than 30% of rural and urban population are deceived by this fake news problem. As we have been studying, there is only few literatures on preventing the spread of fake news in Bahasa Indonesia. So, this research is conducted to prevent these problems. The dataset used in this research was obtained from a news portal that identifies fake news, turnbackhoax.id. Using Web Scrapping on this page, we got 1116 data consisting of valid news and fake news. The dataset can be accessed at https://github.com/JibranFawaid/turnbackhoax-dataset. This dataset will be combined with other available datasets. The methods used are CNN, BiLSTM, Hybrid CNN-BiLSTM, and BERT with Transformer Network. This research shows that the BERT method with Transformer Network has the best results with an accuracy of up to 90%.