Slot-filling and intent detection are well-established tasks in Conversational AI. However, current large-scale benchmarks for these tasks often exclude evaluations of low-resource languages and rely on translations from English benchmarks, thereby predominantly reflecting Western-centric concepts. In this paper, we introduce “INJONGO” - a multicultural, open-source benchmark dataset for 16 African languages with utterances generated by native speakers across diverse domains, including banking, travel, home, and dining. Through extensive experiments, we benchmark fine-tuning multilingual transformer models and prompting large language models (LLMs), and show the advantage of leveraging African-cultural utterances over Western-centric utterances for improving cross-lingual transfer from the English language. Experimental results reveal that current LLMs struggle with the slot-filling task, with GPT-4o achieving an average performance of 26 F1. In contrast, intent detection performance is notably better, with an average accuracy of 70.6%, though it still falls short of fine-tuning baselines. When compared to the English language, GPT-4o and fine-tuning baselines perform similarly on intent detection, achieving an accuracy of approximately 81%. Our findings suggest that LLMs performance is still behind for many low-resource African languages, and more work is needed to further improve their downstream performance.

Hate speech and abusive language are global phenomena that need socio-cultural background knowledge to be understood, identified, and moderated. However, in many regions of the Global South, there have been several documented occurrences of (1) absence of moderation and (2) censorship due to the reliance on keyword spotting out of context. Further, high-profile individuals have frequently been at the center of the moderation process, while large and targeted hate speech campaigns against minorities have been overlooked.These limitations are mainly due to the lack of high-quality data in the local languages and the failure to include local communities in the collection, annotation, and moderation processes. To address this issue, we present AfriHate: a multilingual collection of hate speech and abusive language datasets in 15 African languages. Each instance in AfriHate is a tweet annotated by native speakers familiar with the regional culture. We report the challenges related to the construction of the datasets and present various classification baseline results with and without using LLMs. We find that model performance highly depends on the language and that multilingual models can help boost performance in low-resource settings.

Despite the widespread adoption of Large language models (LLMs), their remarkable capabilities remain limited to a few high-resource languages. Additionally, many low-resource languages (e.g. African languages) are often evaluated only on basic text classification tasks due to the lack of appropriate or comprehensive benchmarks outside of high-resource languages. In this paper, we introduce IrokoBench—a human-translated benchmark dataset for 17 typologically-diverse low-resource African languages covering three tasks: natural language inference(AfriXNLI), mathematical reasoning(AfriMGSM), and multi-choice knowledge-based QA(AfriMMLU). We use IrokoBench to evaluate zero-shot, few-shot, and translate-test settings(where test sets are translated into English) across 10 open and four proprietary LLMs. Our evaluation reveals a significant performance gap between high-resource languages (such as English and French) and low-resource African languages. We observe a significant performance gap between open and proprietary models, with the highest performing open model, Gemma 2 27B only at 63% of the best-performing proprietary model GPT-4o performance. Machine translating the test set to English before evaluation helped to close the gap for larger models that are English-centric, like Gemma 2 27B and LLaMa 3.1 70B. These findings suggest that more efforts are needed to develop and adapt LLMs for African languages.