Nigerian Pidgin is arguably the most widely spoken language in Nigeria. Variants of this language are also spoken across West and Central Africa, making it a very important language. This work aims to establish supervised and unsupervised neural machine translation (NMT) baselines between English and Nigerian Pidgin. We implement and compare NMT models with different tokenization methods, creating a solid foundation for future works.
Over 800 languages are spoken across West Africa. Despite the obvious diversity among people who speak these languages, one language significantly unifies them all - West African Pidgin English. There are at least 80 million speakers of West African Pidgin English. However, there is no known natural language processing (NLP) work on this language. In this work, we perform the first NLP work on the most popular variant of the language, providing three major contributions. First, the provision of a Pidgin corpus of over 56000 sentences, which is the largest we know of. Secondly, the training of …
Nigerian English adaptation, Pidgin, has evolved over the years through multi-language code switching, code mixing and linguistic adaptation. While Pidgin preserves many of the words in the normal English language corpus, both in spelling and pronunciation, the fundamental meaning of these words have changed significantly. For example,'ginger' is not a plant but an expression of motivation and 'tank' is not a container but an expression of gratitude. The implication is that the current approach of using direct English sentiment analysis of social media text from Nigeria is sub-optimal, as it w…
Niger-Volta Language Technologies Institute（尼日尔-沃尔特语言技术研究所）
Many Nigerian languages have relinquished their previous prestige and purpose in modern society to English and Nigerian Pidgin. For the millions of L1 speakers of indigenous languages, there are inequalities that manifest themselves as unequal access to information, communications, health care, security as well as attenuated participation in political and civic life. To minimize exclusion and promote socio-linguistic and economic empowerment, this work explores the feasibility of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) for the Edoid language family of Southern Nigeria. Using the new JW300 public data…
Luleå University of Technology（吕勒奥理工大学）；Masakhane；CIS
Dialogue generation is an important NLP task fraught with many challenges. The challenges become more daunting for low-resource African languages. To enable the creation of dialogue agents for African languages, we contribute the first high-quality dialogue datasets for 6 African languages: Swahili, Wolof, Hausa, Nigerian Pidgin English, Kinyarwanda & Yorùbá. These datasets consist of 1,500 turns each, which we translate from a portion of the English multi-domain MultiWOZ dataset. Subsequently, we investigate & analyze the effectiveness of modelling through transfer learning by utilziing state…
Does Generative AI speak Nigerian-Pidgin?: Issues about Representativeness and Bias for Multilingualism in LLMs
Mila - Quebec AI Institute McGill University, Canada（魁北克AI研究所麦吉尔大学，加拿大）；LT3, IDLab, Universiteit Gent（LT3，IDLab，根特大学）；Bloomberg（彭博）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）
LIAAD - INESC TEC；Faculty of Sciences-University of Porto（波尔图大学理学院）；Saarland University（萨尔大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Bayero University（巴耶罗大学）；Ahmadu Bello University（艾哈迈杜·贝罗大学）；Microsoft Research India（微软研究院印度）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Clear Global；Kaduna state University（卡杜纳州立大学）
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 (and 14,000 for Nigerian-Pidgin), 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 …
Ibom NLP: A Step Toward Inclusive Natural Language Processing for Nigeria's Minority Languages
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Howard University（电气工程与计算机科学系，霍华德大学）；AIMS Research and Innovation Centre（AIMS研究与创新中心）；NM-AIST；Mila - Quebec AI Institute（魁北克AI研究所）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Canada CIFAR AI Chair（加拿大CIFAR人工智能主席）；Korapay；National Institute for Nigerian Languages（尼日利亚语言国家研究所）；University of Uyo（乌耶大学）
West African Pidgin English is a language that is significantly spoken in West Africa, consisting of at least 75 million speakers. Nevertheless, proper machine translation systems and relevant NLP datasets for pidgin English are virtually absent. In this work, we develop techniques targeted at bridging the gap between Pidgin English and English in the context of natural language generation. %As a proof of concept, we explore the proposed techniques in the area of data-to-text generation. By building upon the previously released monolingual Pidgin English text and parallel English data-to-text …
Most of the common applications of Named Entity Recognition (NER) is on English and other highly available languages. In this work, we present our findings on Named Entity Recognition for 5 Nigerian Languages (Nigerian English, Nigerian Pidgin English, Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa). These languages are considered low-resourced, and very little openly available Natural Language Processing work has been done in most of them. In this work, individual NER models were trained and metrics recorded for each of the languages. We also worked on a combined model that can handle Named Entity Recognition (NER) …
University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Uppsala University（乌普萨拉大学）；KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）；Wuhan University of Science and Technology（武汉科技大学）
Creole languages such as Nigerian Pidgin English and Haitian Creole are under-resourced and largely ignored in the NLP literature. Creoles typically result from the fusion of a foreign language with multiple local languages, and what grammatical and lexical features are transferred to the creole is a complex process. While creoles are generally stable, the prominence of some features may be much stronger with certain demographics or in some linguistic situations. This paper makes several contributions: We collect existing corpora and release models for Haitian Creole, Nigerian Pidgin English, …
