Papers by Orevaoghene Ahia
That was the last straw, we need more: Are Translation Systems Sensitive to Disambiguating Context? (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for translation of ambiguous text use context to disambiguate meaning . current models for MTs consistently translate English idioms literally, whereas LMs are context-aware . |
| Approach: | They use a dataset of 512 pairs of English sentences to study semantic ambiguities . they use literal and figurative idioms to disambiguate intended meaning . |
| Outcome: | The results show that current models translate English idioms literally, even when the context suggests a figurative interpretation. |
LEXPLAIN: Improving Model Explanations via Lexicon Supervision (2023.starsem-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods that extract features from input text to explain a classifier's prediction are limiting to models that are faithful to their predictions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for guiding model explanations by supervising them explicitly using task-related lexicons to direct supervise model explanation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves model explanations without sacrificing performance on sentiment analysis and toxicity detection tasks while demoting spurious correlations with African American English dialects. |
MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African Languages (2021.tacl-1)
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David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Jade Abbott, Graham Neubig, Daniel D’souza, Julia Kreutzer, Constantine Lignos, Chester Palen-Michel, Happy Buzaaba, Shruti Rijhwani, Sebastian Ruder, Stephen Mayhew, Israel Abebe Azime, Shamsuddeen H. Muhammad, Chris Chinenye Emezue, Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende, Perez Ogayo, Aremu Anuoluwapo, Catherine Gitau, Derguene Mbaye, Jesujoba Alabi, Seid Muhie Yimam, Tajuddeen Rabiu Gwadabe, Ignatius Ezeani, Rubungo Andre Niyongabo, Jonathan Mukiibi, Verrah Otiende, Iroro Orife, Davis David, Samba Ngom, Tosin Adewumi, Paul Rayson, Mofetoluwa Adeyemi, Gerald Muriuki, Emmanuel Anebi, Chiamaka Chukwuneke, Nkiruka Odu, Eric Peter Wairagala, Samuel Oyerinde, Clemencia Siro, Tobius Saul Bateesa, Temilola Oloyede, Yvonne Wambui, Victor Akinode, Deborah Nabagereka, Maurice Katusiime, Ayodele Awokoya, Mouhamadane MBOUP, Dibora Gebreyohannes, Henok Tilaye, Kelechi Nwaike, Degaga Wolde, Abdoulaye Faye, Blessing Sibanda, Orevaoghene Ahia, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Kelechi Ogueji, Thierno Ibrahima DIOP, Abdoulaye Diallo, Adewale Akinfaderin, Tendai Marengereke, Salomey Osei
| Challenge: | (2020) African languages are underrepresented in existing natural language processing datasets, research, and tools due to lack of datasets and reproducible results. |
| Approach: | They propose to create a dataset for named entity recognition (NER) in ten African languages. |
| Outcome: | The results of the first large dataset for named entity recognition (NER) in ten African languages are released to inform future research on African NLP. |
The Low-Resource Double Bind: An Empirical Study of Pruning for Low-Resource Machine Translation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Extending state-of-the-art language models to low-resource languages requires addressing what we call the low-Resource double bind. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-resource double bind to refer to the co-occurrence of data limitations and compute resource constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on frequent sentences but disparates on infrequent ones. |
Quality at a Glance: An Audit of Web-Crawled Multilingual Datasets (2022.tacl-1)
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Julia Kreutzer, Isaac Caswell, Lisa Wang, Ahsan Wahab, Daan van Esch, Nasanbayar Ulzii-Orshikh, Allahsera Tapo, Nishant Subramani, Artem Sokolov, Claytone Sikasote, Monang Setyawan, Supheakmungkol Sarin, Sokhar Samb, Benoît Sagot, Clara Rivera, Annette Rios, Isabel Papadimitriou, Salomey Osei, Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Iroro Orife, Kelechi Ogueji, Andre Niyongabo Rubungo, Toan Q. Nguyen, Mathias Müller, André Müller, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Nanda Muhammad, Ayanda Mnyakeni, Jamshidbek Mirzakhalov, Tapiwanashe Matangira, Colin Leong, Nze Lawson, Sneha Kudugunta, Yacine Jernite, Mathias Jenny, Orhan Firat, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Sakhile Dlamini, Nisansa de Silva, Sakine Çabuk Ballı, Stella Biderman, Alessia Battisti, Ahmed Baruwa, Ankur Bapna, Pallavi Baljekar, Israel Abebe Azime, Ayodele Awokoya, Duygu Ataman, Orevaoghene Ahia, Oghenefego Ahia, Sweta Agrawal, Mofetoluwa Adeyemi
| Challenge: | Lower-resource corpora have systematic issues, including mislabeled or nonstandard/ambiguous language codes. |
| Approach: | They manually audit the quality of 205 language-specific corpora released with five major public datasets. |
| Outcome: | The results show that lower-resource corpora have systematic issues even for non-proficient speakers. |
Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languages (2020.findings-emnlp)
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Wilhelmina Nekoto, Vukosi Marivate, Tshinondiwa Matsila, Timi Fasubaa, Taiwo Fagbohungbe, Solomon Oluwole Akinola, Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Salomon Kabongo Kabenamualu, Salomey Osei, Freshia Sackey, Rubungo Andre Niyongabo, Ricky Macharm, Perez Ogayo, Orevaoghene Ahia, Musie Meressa Berhe, Mofetoluwa Adeyemi, Masabata Mokgesi-Selinga, Lawrence Okegbemi, Laura Martinus, Kolawole Tajudeen, Kevin Degila, Kelechi Ogueji, Kathleen Siminyu, Julia Kreutzer, Jason Webster, Jamiil Toure Ali, Jade Abbott, Iroro Orife, Ignatius Ezeani, Idris Abdulkadir Dangana, Herman Kamper, Hady Elsahar, Goodness Duru, Ghollah Kioko, Murhabazi Espoir, Elan van Biljon, Daniel Whitenack, Christopher Onyefuluchi, Chris Chinenye Emezue, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Blessing Sibanda, Blessing Bassey, Ayodele Olabiyi, Arshath Ramkilowan, Alp Öktem, Adewale Akinfaderin, Abdallah Bashir
| Challenge: | 'Low-resourced'-ness is a complex problem that goes beyond data availability and reflects systemic problems in society. |
| Approach: | They propose to use machine translation to scale to low-resourced languages by using a dataset and a benchmarking system to measure their resource use. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach allows participants without formal training to make a unique scientific contribution. |
Better Quality Pre-training Data and T5 Models for African Languages (2023.emnlp-main)
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Akintunde Oladipo, Mofetoluwa Adeyemi, Orevaoghene Ahia, Abraham Owodunni, Odunayo Ogundepo, David Adelani, Jimmy Lin
| Challenge: | Existing web crawls have demonstrated quality issues for low-resource languages . Existing pretraining corpora have numerous quality issues . |
| Approach: | They propose to audit existing pretraining corpora to understand and rectify quality issues . they pretrain a new T5-based model and evaluate its performance on multiple tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing pretrained models on four NLP tasks. |
Extracting Lexical Features from Dialects via Interpretable Dialect Classifiers (2024.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Identifying linguistic differences between dialects of a language often requires expert knowledge and meticulous human analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to extract distinguishing lexical features of dialects by utilizing interpretable dialect classifiers in the absence of human experts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method extracts key language-specific lexical features that contribute to dialectal variations. |
Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering for African Languages (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Odunayo Ogundepo, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Clara Rivera, Jonathan Clark, Sebastian Ruder, David Adelani, Bonaventure Dossou, Abdou Diop, Claytone Sikasote, Gilles Hacheme, Happy Buzaaba, Ignatius Ezeani, Rooweither Mabuya, Salomey Osei, Chris Emezue, Albert Kahira, Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Akintunde Oladipo, Abraham Owodunni, Atnafu Tonja, Iyanuoluwa Shode, Akari Asai, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Ayodele Awokoya, Bernard Opoku, Chiamaka Chukwuneke, Christine Mwase, Clemencia Siro, Stephen Arthur, Tunde Ajayi, Verrah Otiende, Andre Rubungo, Boyd Sinkala, Daniel Ajisafe, Emeka Onwuegbuzia, Falalu Lawan, Ibrahim Ahmad, Jesujoba Alabi, Chinedu Mbonu, Mofetoluwa Adeyemi, Mofya Phiri, Orevaoghene Ahia, Ruqayya Iro, Sonia Adhiambo
| Challenge: | Our Dataset is the first cross-lingual QA dataset with a focus on African languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use African languages as the only high-coverage source of answer content for cross-lingual open-retrieval question answering systems. |
| Outcome: | Our Dataset includes 12,000+ XOR QA examples across 10 African languages. |
Do All Languages Cost the Same? Tokenization in the Era of Commercial Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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Orevaoghene Ahia, Sachin Kumar, Hila Gonen, Jungo Kasai, David Mortensen, Noah Smith, Yulia Tsvetkov
| Challenge: | Language models have evolved from being research prototypes to commercialized products offered as web APIs. |
| Approach: | They conduct a systematic analysis of the cost and utility of OpenAI’s language model API on multilingual benchmarks in 22 typologically diverse languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed language model API performs poorly on multiple languages and speakers of a large number of languages are overcharged while obtaining poorer results. |
What a Creole Wants, What a Creole Needs (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent efforts to improve the quality of high-resource languages focus on translating existing datasets into other languages, but this approach ignores that different language communities have different needs. |
| Approach: | They examine how things needed from language technology can change dramatically from one language to another. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method ignores that different language communities have different needs. |
FLEXITOKENS: Flexible Tokenization for Evolving Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Widely used subword tokenizers overfragment sequences in unseen domains, languages, and scripts . inefficient tokenizer models can cause overfragments in out-of-distribution domains if not trained properly . |
| Approach: | They propose a byte-level LM with learnable tokenizers to make tokenization adaptive . they propose 'flexitoken' which enables significantly greater flexibility during adaptation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces token overfragmentation and improves on multilingual benchmarks and domains. |
Intriguing Properties of Compression on Multilingual Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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Kelechi Ogueji, Orevaoghene Ahia, Gbemileke Onilude, Sebastian Gehrmann, Sara Hooker, Julia Kreutzer
| Challenge: | Multilingual models are dependent on scaling to generalize to a growing number of languages . compression techniques can have disparate effects on model performance for low-resource languages if used sparsely . |
| Approach: | They propose to characterize the impact of sparsifying multilingual pre-trained language models during fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework characterizes the impact of sparsifying multilingual pre-trained language models during fine-tuning. |
Voices Unheard: NLP Resources and Models for Yorùbá Regional Dialects (2024.emnlp-main)
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Orevaoghene Ahia, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Diana Abagyan, Hila Gonen, David Adelani, Daud Abolade, Noah Smith, Yulia Tsvetkov
| Challenge: | Recent efforts to develop NLP tools for low-resource languages focus on their standard dialects. |
| Approach: | They propose a high-quality parallel text and speech corpus for Yoruba . they use native speakers to collect data from four regional yoruba dialects . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that dialect-adaptive finetuning can narrow performance disparities . the dataset will be released publicly under an open license . |
Teaching LLMs to Abstain across Languages via Multilingual Feedback (2024.emnlp-main)
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Shangbin Feng, Weijia Shi, Yike Wang, Wenxuan Ding, Orevaoghene Ahia, Shuyue Stella Li, Vidhisha Balachandran, Sunayana Sitaram, Yulia Tsvetkov
| Challenge: | Existing studies on LLM abstention focus on English, but they show that it can reduce the accuracy of the model by 20.5% . |
| Approach: | They propose to teach LLMs to abstain in the face of knowledge gaps by generating multiple feedback items in related languages. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms baselines and achieves 9.2% improvement for low-resource languages. |
MasakhaNER 2.0: Africa-centric Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognition (2022.emnlp-main)
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David Adelani, Graham Neubig, Sebastian Ruder, Shruti Rijhwani, Michael Beukman, Chester Palen-Michel, Constantine Lignos, Jesujoba Alabi, Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Peter Nabende, Cheikh M. Bamba Dione, Andiswa Bukula, Rooweither Mabuya, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Blessing Sibanda, Happy Buzaaba, Jonathan Mukiibi, Godson Kalipe, Derguene Mbaye, Amelia Taylor, Fatoumata Kabore, Chris Chinenye Emezue, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Perez Ogayo, Catherine Gitau, Edwin Munkoh-Buabeng, Victoire Memdjokam Koagne, Allahsera Auguste Tapo, Tebogo Macucwa, Vukosi Marivate, Mboning Tchiaze Elvis, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Tosin Adewumi, Orevaoghene Ahia, Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende, Neo Lerato Mokono, Ignatius Ezeani, Chiamaka Chukwuneke, Mofetoluwa Oluwaseun Adeyemi, Gilles Quentin Hacheme, Idris Abdulmumin, Odunayo Ogundepo, Oreen Yousuf, Tatiana Moteu, Dietrich Klakow
| Challenge: | Existing studies on named entity recognition methods for African languages focus on English as the source language, but there is evidence that it is not the best for low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use human-annotated datasets to analyze named entity recognition tasks in 20 African languages to test whether they are effective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves zero-shot F1 scores by 14% over 20 languages compared to using English . |
Critical Learning Periods: Leveraging Early Training Dynamics for Efficient Data Pruning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Neural Machine Translation models are extremely data-hungry and require a large dataset to maintain data quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a new data pruning technique that leverages early model training dynamics to identify the most relevant data points for model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique outperforms the benchmarks on indo-European languages while pruning up to 50% of training data. |