Croatia

This article offers an overview of the IsiXhosa Intellectual Traditions Digital Archive, which hosts digitized texts and images of early isiXhosa newspapers and books from 1870-1914. The archive offers new opportunities for a range of research across multiple fields, and responds to debates around the importance of African intellectual traditions and their indigenous language sources in generating African social sciences which is contextually relevant. We outline the content and context of these materials and offer qualitative and quantitative details with the aim of providing an overview for interested scholars and a reference for those using the archive.

EACL 2023

IsiXhosa Intellectual Traditions Digital Archive: Digitizing isiXhosa texts from 1870-1914

ocr texts

isixhosa books

isixhosa newspapers

isixhosa text archive

workshop paper

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

This paper introduces two multilingual government themed corpora in various South African languages. The corpora were collected by gathering the South African Government newspaper (Vuk'uzenzele), as well as South African government speeches (ZA-gov-multilingual), that are translated into all 11 South African official languages. The corpora can be used for a myriad of downstream NLP tasks. The corpora were created to allow researchers to study the language used in South African government publications, with a focus on understanding how South African government officials communicate with their constituents. 

In this paper we highlight the process of gathering, cleaning and making available the corpora. We create parallel sentence corpora for Neural Machine Translation (NMT) tasks using Language-Agnostic Sentence Representations (LASER) embeddings. With these aligned sentences we then provide NMT benchmarks for 9 indigenous languages by fine-tuning a massively multilingual pre-trained language model.

Preparing the Vuk'uzenzele and ZA-gov-multilingual South African multilingual corpora

This paper presents a spell checker and correction tool specifically designed for Wolof, an under-represented spoken language in Africa. The proposed spell checker leverages a combination of a trie data structure, dynamic programming, and the weighted Levenshtein distance to generate suggestions for misspelled words. We created novel linguistic resources for Wolof, such as a lexicon and a corpus of misspelled words, using a semi-automatic approach that combines manual and automatic annotation methods. Despite the limited data available for the Wolof language, the spell checker’s performance showed a predictive accuracy of 98.31% and a suggestion accuracy of 93.33%.
Our primary focus remains the revitalization and preservation of Wolof as an Indigenous and spoken language in Africa, providing our efforts to develop novel linguistic resources. This work represents a valuable contribution to the growth of computational tools and resources for the Wolof language and provides a strong foundation for future studies in the automatic spell checking and correction field.

Automatic Spell Checker and Correction for Under-represented Spoken Languages: Case Study on Wolof

We present the SpeechReporting
database, an online collection of corpora annotated for a range of discourse phenomena. The corpora contain folktales from 7 lesserstudied West African languages. Apart from its value for theoretical linguistics, especially
for the study of reported speech, the database is an important resource for the preservation of intangible cultural heritage of minority languages and the development and testing of cross-linguistically applicable computational tools.

SpeechReporting Corpus: annotated corpora of West African traditional narratives

This paper showcases new research avenues made possible by applying computational methods to historical isiXhosa text. I outline a method for isiXhosa computational text analysis which adapts word frequency analysis to be applied to isiXhosa texts focusing on root words. The paper showcases the value of the approach in a study of emerging political identities in early African nationalism, examining a novel dataset of isiXhosa newspapers from 1874 to 1890. The analysis shows how a shared identity of ‘Blackness’ (Abantsundu and Abamnyama) dynamically emerged, and follows the impact of leading intellectuals as well as African voter mobilization in shaping communal political discourse.

Analyzing political formation through historical isiXhosa text analysis: Using frequency analysis to examine emerging African Nationalism in South Africa

In this study, we investigate the effectiveness of using cross-lingual word embeddings for zero-shot transfer learning between a language with an abundant resource, English, and a language with limited resource, isiZulu. IsiZulu is a part of the South African Nguni language family, which is characterised by complex agglutinating morphology. We use VecMap, an open source tool, to obtain cross-lingual word embeddings. To perform an extrinsic evaluation of the effectiveness of the embeddings, we train a news classifier on labelled English data in order to categorise unlabelled isiZulu data using zero-shot transfer learning. In our study,
we found our model to have a weighted average F1-score of 0.34. Our findings demonstrate that VecMap generates modular word embeddings in the cross-lingual space that have an impact on the downstream classifier used for zero-shot
transfer learning.

Unsupervised Cross-lingual Word Embedding Representation for English-isiZulu

Investigating Sentiment-Bearing Words- and Emoji-based Distant Supervision Approaches for Sentiment Analysis

Dependency annotation can be a laborious process for under-resourced languages. However, in some cases, other resources are available. 
We investigate whether we can leverage such resources in the case of Swahili: We use the annotations of the Helsinki Corpus of Swahili for creating a Universal Dependencies treebank for Swahili. The Helsinki Corpus of Swahili provides word-level annotations for part of speech tags, morphological features, and functional syntactic tags. We train neural taggers for these types of annotations, then use those models to annotate our target corpus, the Swahili portion of the Global Voices Corpus. Based on the word-level annotations, we then manually create constraint grammar rules to annotate the target corpus for Universal Dependencies. We describe the process, discuss the annotation decisions we had to make, and we evaluate the approach.

Towards a Swahili Universal Dependency Treebank: Leveraging the Annotations of the Helsinki Corpus of Swahili

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that the recently developed automated rule-based syllabification system for Sesotho can be used broadly across the officially recognised South African Sotho-Tswana language group encompassing Sepedi, Sesotho and Setswana. We evaluate the automatic syllabification system on 400 words comprising 100 most frequently used words and 100 least-used words in Sepedi and Setswana as provided in the Autshumato corpus publicly available online. It is found that the Sesotho rule-based syllabification system can be used to correctly identify vowel-only syllables, consonant-vowel syllables and consonant-only syllables in Sepedi and Setswana. Among other findings, it has been demonstrated that words with diacritics as in the case of Sepedi are correctly broken down into syllables. We make two main recommendations. First, the rules for syllabification should be updated so that Sepedi diacritics are accommodated. Second, the syllabification system should be updated so that it reflects the broader Sotho-Tswana language group instead of being limited to Sesotho. Further research is needed to ascertain whether the complex consonant behaves similarly in all three officially recognised Sotho-Tswana languages and evaluate the need for a specific rule for the nasal consonant. 


Evaluating the Sesotho rule-based syllabification system on Sepedi and Setswana words

Deep learning and low-resource languages: How much data is enough? A case study of three linguistically distinct South African languages

Orthographic standardization is a milestone in a language's documentation and the development of its resources. However, texts written in former orthographies remain relevant to the language's history and development and therefore must be converted to the standardized orthography. Ensuring a language has access to the orthographically standardized version of all of its recorded texts is important in the development of resources as it provides additional textual resources for training, supports contribution of authors using former writing systems, and provides information about the development of the language. This paper evaluates the performance of natural language processing methods, specifically Finite State Transducers and Long Short-term Memory networks, for the orthographical conversion of Bàsàá texts from the Protestant missionary orthography to the now-standard AGLC orthography, with the conclusion that LSTMs are somewhat more effective in the absence of explicit lexical information.

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Preparing the Vuk'uzenzele and ZA-gov-multilingual South African multilingual corpora

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Preparing the Vuk'uzenzele and ZA-gov-multilingual South African multilingual corpora

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