Md Mahfuz Ibn Alam’s scientific contributions

Neural machine translation (NMT) systems exhibit limited robustness in handling source-side linguistic variations. Their performance tends to degrade when faced with even slight deviations in language usage, such as different domains or variations introduced by second-language speakers. It is intuitive to extend this observation to encompass dialectal variations as well, but the work allowing the community to evaluate MT systems on this dimension is limited. To alleviate this issue, we compile and release \dataset, a contrastive dialectal benchmark encompassing 882 different variations from nine different languages. We also quantitatively demonstrate the challenges large MT models face in effectively translating dialectal variants. We are releasing all code and data.

We present BIG-C (Bemba Image Grounded Conversations), a large multimodal dataset for Bemba. While Bemba is the most populous language of Zambia, it exhibits a dearth of resources which render the development of language technologies or language processing research almost impossible. The dataset is comprised of multi-turn dialogues between Bemba speakers based on images, transcribed and translated into English. There are more than 92,000 utterances/sentences, amounting to more than 180 hours of audio data with corresponding transcriptions and English translations. We also provide baselines on speech recognition (ASR), machine translation (MT) and speech translation (ST) tasks, and sketch out other potential future multimodal uses of our dataset. We hope that by making the dataset available to the research community, this work will foster research and encourage collaboration across the language, speech, and vision communities especially for languages outside the "traditionally" used high-resourced ones. All data and code are publicly available: https://github.com/csikasote/bigc.

Knowing the language of an input text/audio is a necessary first step for using almost every natural language processing (NLP) tool such as taggers, parsers, or translation systems. Language identification is a well-studied problem, sometimes even considered solved; in reality, most of the world's 7000 languages are not supported by current systems. This lack of representation affects large-scale data mining efforts and further exacerbates data shortage for low-resource languages. We take a step towards tackling the data bottleneck by compiling a corpus of over 50K parallel children's stories in 350+ languages and dialects, and the computation bottleneck by building lightweight hierarchical models for language identification. Our data can serve as benchmark data for language identification of short texts and for understudied translation directions such as those between Indian or African languages. Our proposed method, Hierarchical LIMIT, uses limited computation to expand coverage into excluded languages while maintaining prediction quality.

This report describes GMU's sentiment analysis system for the SemEval-2023 shared task AfriSenti-SemEval. We participated in all three sub-tasks: Monolingual, Multilingual, and Zero-Shot. Our approach uses models initialized with AfroXLMR-large, a pre-trained multilingual language model trained on African languages and fine-tuned correspondingly. We also introduce augmented training data along with original training data. Alongside finetuning, we perform phylogeny-based adapter tuning to create several models and ensemble the best models for the final submission. Our system achieves the best F1-score on track 5: Amharic, with 6.2 points higher F1-score than the second-best performing system on this track. Overall, our system ranks 5th among the 10 systems participating in all 15 tracks.