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Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technologies have seen significant advancements, yet many widely spoken languages remain underrepresented. This paper explores the fine-tuning of OpenAI&#39;s Whisper Tiny model (39M parameters) for Swahili, a lingua franca for over 100 million people across East Africa. Using a dataset of 5,520 Swahili audio samples, we analyze the model&#39;s performance, error patterns, and limitations after fine-tuning. Our results demonstrate the potential of fine-tuning for improving transcription accuracy, while also highlighting persistent challenges such as phonetic misinterpretations, named entity recognition failures, and difficulties with morphologically complex words. We provide recommendations for improving Swahili ASR, including scaling to larger model variants, architectural adaptations for agglutinative languages, and data enhancement strategies. This work contributes to the growing body of research on adapting pre-trained multilingual ASR systems to low-resource languages, emphasizing the need for approaches that account for the unique linguistic features of Bantu languages.

ACL 2025

Fine-tuning Whisper Tiny for Swahili ASR: Challenges and Recommendations for Low-Resource Speech Recognition

#### *Message from the General Chair, Aline Villavicencio*
I’m delighted and honoured to welcome you to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026), taking place in the beautiful city of Rabat, in Morocco, in March 24-29, 2026. EACL is the flagship European conference of the Association and EACL 2026 proudly continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity. I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers whose dedication, generosity, and tireless efforts have made this conference possible.
For the first time EACL is being hosted in the African continent. This is an important milestone for our community, and we are grateful to our Moroccan hosts for enabling this historic moment by bringing this edition of EACL to Rabat. We are also delighted that the Second Arabic NLP School is co-located with EACL. We hope attendees enjoy this wonderful opportunity to strengthen ties with the Computational Linguistics communities across the African continent. *[Read full message](https://drive.google.com/file/d/14NlmHvwM6fPJuMmOvVh7K0vtQbEyv3SZ/view?usp=sharing)* 

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EACL 2026

Welcome to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). EACL 2026 will be held in Rabat, Morocco, from March 24–29, 2026. 

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technologies have seen significant advancements, yet many widely spoken languages remain underrepresented. This paper explores the fine-tuning of OpenAI's Whisper Tiny model (39M parameters) for Swahili, a lingua franca for over 100 million people across East Africa. Using a dataset of 5,520 Swahili audio samples, we analyze the model's performance, error patterns, and limitations after fine-tuning. Our results demonstrate the potential of fine-tuning for improving transcription accuracy, while also highlighting persistent challenges such as phonetic misinterpretations, named entity recognition failures, and difficulties with morphologically complex words. We provide recommendations for improving Swahili ASR, including scaling to larger model variants, architectural adaptations for agglutinative languages, and data enhancement strategies. This work contributes to the growing body of research on adapting pre-trained multilingual ASR systems to low-resource languages, emphasizing the need for approaches that account for the unique linguistic features of Bantu languages.

workshop paper

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
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Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems face significant challenges when working with low-resource languages, particularly in domain adaptation tasks. These difficulties arise due to limited training data and suboptimal model generalization, As a result, selecting an optimal model for translation is crucial for achieving strong performance on in-domain data, particularly in scenarios where fine-tuning is not feasible or practical. In this paper, we investigate strategies for selecting the most suitable NMT model for a given domain using bandit-based algorithms, including Upper Confidence Bound, Linear UCB, Neural Linear Bandit, and Thompson Sampling. Our method effectively addresses the resource constraints by facilitating optimal model selection with high confidence. We evaluate the approach across three African languages and domains, demonstrating its robustness and effectiveness in both scenarios where target data is available and where it is absent.

In-Domain African Languages Translation Using LLMs and Multi-armed Bandits

Despite the increasing prevalence of smishing attacks targeting Mobile Money Transfer systems, there is a notable lack of publicly available SMS phishing datasets in this domain. This study seeks to address this gap by creating a specialized dataset designed to detect smishing attacks aimed at Mobile Money Transfer users. The data set consists of crowd-sourced text messages from Mozambican mobile users, meticulously annotated into two categories: legitimate messages (ham) and fraudulent smishing attempts (spam). The messages are written in Portuguese, often incorporating microtext styles and linguistic nuances unique to the Mozambican context. We also investigate the effectiveness of LLMs in detecting smishing. Using in-context learning approaches, we evaluate the models' ability to identify smishing attempts without requiring extensive task-specific training. The data set is released under an open license at the following link: huggingface-Anonymous.

MOZ-Smishing: A Benchmark Dataset for Detecting Mobile Money Frauds

Despite advances in multilingual natural language processing (NLP) and machine translation (MT), African languages remain underrepresented due to data scarcity, tokenisation inefficiencies, and bias in AI models. Large-scale systems such as Meta AI’s No Language Left Behind (NLLB) and the Flores-200 benchmark have improved low-resource language support, yet critical gaps persist, particularly in healthcare, where accuracy and trust are essential. This study systematically reviews over 30 peer-reviewed papers, technical reports, and datasets to assess the effectiveness of existing multilingual NLP models, specifically Masakhane-MT, Masakhane-NER, and AfromT, in African healthcare contexts. The analysis focuses on four languages with available evaluation data: Swahili, Yoruba, Hausa, and Igbo. Findings show that while AI tools such as medical chatbots and disease surveillance systems demonstrate promise, current models face persistent challenges including domain adaptation failures, cultural and linguistic bias, and limited explainability. Use cases like Ubenwa’s infant cry analysis tool and multilingual health translation systems illustrate both potential and risk, especially where translation errors or opacity may impact clinical decisions. The paper highlights the need for ethically grounded, domain-specific NLP approaches that reflect Africa’s linguistic diversity. We recommend strategies to address dataset imbalance, reduce bias, and improve explainability, while also calling for increased computational infrastructure and local AI governance. These steps are critical to making AI-driven healthcare solutions equitable, transparent, and effective for Africa’s multilingual populations.

Multilingual NLP for African Healthcare Bias, Translation, and Explainability Challenges

Morphological parsing is the task of decomposing words into morphemes, the smallest units of meaning in a language, and labelling their grammatical roles. It is a particularly challenging task for agglutinative languages, such as the Nguni languages of South Africa, which construct words by concatenating multiple morphemes. A morphological parsing system can be framed as a pipeline with two separate components, a segmenter followed by a tagger. This paper investigates the use of neural methods to build morphological taggers for the four Nguni languages. We compare two classes of approaches: training neural sequence labellers (LSTMs and neural CRFs) from scratch and finetuning pretrained language models. We compare performance across these two categories, as well as to a traditional rule-based morphological parser. Neural taggers comfortably outperform the rule-based baseline and models trained from scratch tend to outperform pretrained models. We also compare parsing results across different upstream segmenters and with varying linguistic input features. Our findings confirm the viability of employing neural taggers based on pre-existing morphological segmenters for the Nguni languages.

Neural Morphological Tagging for Nguni Languages

This research article examines the effectiveness of various pretraining strategies for developing machine translation models tailored to low-resource languages. Although this work considers several low-resource languages, including Afrikaans, Swahili, and Zulu, the translation model is specifically developed for Lingala, an under-resourced African language, building upon the pretraining approach introduced by Reid and Artetxe (2021), originally designed for high-resource languages. Through a series of comprehensive experiments, we explore different pretraining methodologies, including the integration of multiple languages and the use of both monolingual and parallel data during the pretraining phase. Our findings indicate that pretraining on multiple languages and leveraging both monolingual and parallel data significantly enhance translation quality. This study offers valuable insights into effective pretraining strategies for low-resource machine translation, helping to bridge the performance gap between high-resource and low-resource languages. The results contribute to the broader goal of developing more inclusive and accurate NLP models for marginalized communities and underrepresented populations. The code and datasets used in this study are publicly available to facilitate further research and ensure reproducibility, with the exception of certain data that may no longer be accessible due to changes in public availability.

Pretraining Strategies using Monolingual and Parallel Data for Low-Resource Machine Translation

Medication errors are among the leading causes of avoidable harm in healthcare systems across the world. A large portion of these errors stem from inefficient information retrieval processes and lack of comprehension of drug information. In low-resource settings, these issues are exacerbated by limited access to updated and reliable sources, technological constraints, and linguistic barriers. Innovations to improve the retrieval and comprehension of drug-related information are therefore poised to reduce medication errors and improve patient outcomes. This research employed open-source Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) integrated with multilingual translation and Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems. Using open-source tools, a corpus was created from prominent sources of medical information in Nigeria and stored as high-level text embeddings in a Chroma database. Upon user query, relevant drug information is retrieved and synthesized using a large language model. This can be translated into Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa languages, and converted into speech through the TTS system, addressing the linguistic accessibility gap. Evaluation of the system by domain experts indicated impressive overall performance in translation, achieving an average accuracy of 73%, and the best performance observed in Hausa and Yoruba. TTS results were moderately effective (mean = 57%), with Igbo scoring highest in speech clarity (68%). However, tonal complexity, especially in Yoruba, posed challenges for accurate pronunciation, highlighting the need for language-specific model fine-tuning. Addressing these linguistic nuances is essential to optimize comprehension and practical utility in diverse healthcare settings. The results demonstrates system’s the potential to improve access to drug information, enhance comprehension, and reduce linguistic barriers. These technologies could substantially mitigate medication errors and improve patient safety. This study offers valuable insights and practical guidelines for future implementations aimed at strengthening global medication safety practices.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation Meets Local Languages for Improved Drug Information Access and Comprehension.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized natural language processing, yet a significant challenge persists: the under representation of low-resource languages. This paper introduces \textsc{SabiYarn}, a novel 125M parameter decoder-only language model specifically designed to address this gap for Nigerian languages. Our research demonstrates that a relatively small language model can achieve remarkable performance across multiple languages even in a low-resource setting when trained on carefully curated task-specific datasets. We introduce a multitask learning framework designed for computational efficiency, leveraging techniques such as sequence packing to maximize token throughput per batch. This allows \textsc{SabiYarn} to make the most of a limited compute budget while achieving strong performance across multiple NLP tasks. This paper not only highlights the effectiveness of our approach but also challenges the notion that only massive models can achieve high performance in diverse linguistic contexts, outperforming models over 100 times its parameter size on specific tasks such as translation (in both directions), Named Entity Recognition, Text Diacritization, and Sentiment Analysis in the low-resource languages it was trained on. SabiYarn-125M represents a significant step towards democratizing NLP technologies for low-resource languages, offering a blueprint for developing efficient, high-performing models tailored to specific linguistic regions. Our work paves the way for more inclusive and culturally sensitive AI systems, potentially transforming how language technologies are developed and deployed in linguistically diverse areas like Nigeria and beyond.

SabiYarn: Advancing Low Resource Languages with Multitask NLP Pretraining

The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) for African languages has been hindered by the lack of large-scale textual data. Previous research has shown that relatively small language models, when trained on synthetic data generated by larger models, can produce fluent, short English stories, providing a data-efficient alternative to large-scale pretraining. In this paper, we apply a similar approach to develop and evaluate small language models for generating children’s stories in isiZulu and Yoruba, using synthetic datasets created through translation and multilingual prompting. We train six language-specific models varying in dataset size and source, and based on the GPT-2 architecture. Our results show that models trained on synthetic low-resource data are capable of producing coherent and fluent short stories in isiZulu and Yoruba. Models trained on larger synthetic datasets generally perform better in terms of coherence and grammar, and also tend to generalize better, as seen by their lower evaluation perplexities. Models trained on datasets generated through prompting instead of translation generate similar or more coherent stories and display more creativity, but perform worse in terms of generalization to unseen data. In addition to the potential educational applications of the automated story generation, our approach has the potential to be used as the foundation for more data-efficient low-resource language models.

Story Generation with Large Language Models for African Languages

Understanding written content can vary significantly based on the linguistic complexity of the text. In the context of Amharic, a morphologically rich and low-resource language, the use of complex vocabulary and less frequent expressions often hinders understanding, particularly among readers with limited literacy skills. Such complexity poses challenges for both human comprehension and NLP applications. Addressing this complexity in Amharic is therefore important for text readability and accessibility. In this study, we developed a text complexity annotation tool using curated list of 1,113 complex Amharic terms. Utilizing this tool, we collected and annotated a dataset comprising 20,000 sentences. Based on the annotated corpus, we developed a text complexity classification model using both traditional and deep learning approaches. For traditional machine learning models, the dataset was vectorized using the Bag-of-Words representation. For deep learning and pre-trained models, we implemented embedding layers based on Word2Vec and BERT, trained on a vocabulary consisting of 24,148 tokens. The experiment is conducted using Support Vector Machine and Random Forest for classical machine learning, and Long Short-Term Memory, Bidirectional LSTM, and BERT for deep learning and pre-trained models. The classification accuracies achieved were 83.5% for SVM, 80.3% for RF, 84.1% for LSTM, 85.0% for BiLSTM, and 89.4% for the BERT-based model. Among these, the BERT-based approaches shows optimal performance for text complexity classifications which have ability to capture long-range dependencies and contextual relationships within the text.

Supervised Machine Learning based Amharic Text Complexity Classification Using Automatic Annotator Tool

In this paper, we propose a comprehensive framework for the classification of Swahili news articles using a combination of classical machine learning techniques, deep neural networks, and transformer-based models. By balancing two diverse datasets sourced from Harvard Dataverse and Kaggle, our approach addresses the inherent challenges of imbalanced data in low-resource languages. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology and set the stage for further advances in Swahili natural language processing.

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In-Domain African Languages Translation Using LLMs and Multi-armed Bandits

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