Abraham Owodunni


2024

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AccentFold: A Journey through African Accents for Zero-Shot ASR Adaptation to Target Accents
Abraham Owodunni | Aditya Yadavalli | Chris Emezue | Tobi Olatunji | Clinton Mbataku
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024

Despite advancements in speech recognition, accented speech remains challenging. While previous approaches have focused on modeling techniques or creating accented speech datasets, gathering sufficient data for the multitude of accents, particularly in the African context, remains impractical due to their sheer diversity and associated budget constraints. To address these challenges, we propose AccentFold, a method that exploits spatial relationships between learned accent embeddings to improve downstream Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Our exploratory analysis of speech embeddings representing 100+ African accents reveals interesting spatial accent relationships highlighting geographic and genealogical similarities, capturing consistent phonological, and morphological regularities, all learned empirically from speech. Furthermore, we discover accent relationships previously uncharacterized by the Ethnologue. Through empirical evaluation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of AccentFold by showing that, for out-of-distribution (OOD) accents, sampling accent subsets for training based on AccentFold information outperforms strong baselines a relative WER improvement of 4.6%. AccentFold presents a promising approach for improving ASR performance on accented speech, particularly in the context of African accents, where data scarcity and budget constraints pose significant challenges. Our findings emphasize the potential of leveraging linguistic relationships to improve zero-shot ASR adaptation to target accents.

2023

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Better Quality Pre-training Data and T5 Models for African Languages
Akintunde Oladipo | Mofetoluwa Adeyemi | Orevaoghene Ahia | Abraham Owodunni | Odunayo Ogundepo | David Adelani | Jimmy Lin
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In this study, we highlight the importance of enhancing the quality of pretraining data in multilingual language models. Existing web crawls have demonstrated quality issues, particularly in the context of low-resource languages. Consequently, we introduce a new multilingual pretraining corpus for 16 African languages, designed by carefully auditing existing pretraining corpora to understand and rectify prevalent quality issues. To compile this dataset, we undertake a rigorous examination of current data sources for thirteen languages within one of the most extensive multilingual web crawls, mC4, and extract cleaner data through meticulous auditing and improved web crawling strategies. Subsequently, we pretrain a new T5-based model on this dataset and evaluate its performance on multiple downstream tasks. Our model demonstrates better downstream effectiveness over existing pretrained models across four NLP tasks, underscoring the critical role data quality plays in pretraining language models in low-resource scenarios. Specifically, on cross-lingual QA evaluation, our new model is more than twice as effective as multilingual T5. All code, data and models are publicly available at https://github.com/castorini/AfriTeVa-keji.

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MasakhaNEWS: News Topic Classification for African languages
David Ifeoluwa Adelani | Marek Masiak | Israel Abebe Azime | Jesujoba Alabi | Atnafu Lambebo Tonja | Christine Mwase | Odunayo Ogundepo | Bonaventure F. P. Dossou | Akintunde Oladipo | Doreen Nixdorf | Chris Chinenye Emezue | Sana Al-azzawi | Blessing Sibanda | Davis David | Lolwethu Ndolela | Jonathan Mukiibi | Tunde Ajayi | Tatiana Moteu | Brian Odhiambo | Abraham Owodunni | Nnaemeka Obiefuna | Muhidin Mohamed | Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad | Teshome Mulugeta Ababu | Saheed Abdullahi Salahudeen | Mesay Gemeda Yigezu | Tajuddeen Gwadabe | Idris Abdulmumin | Mahlet Taye | Oluwabusayo Awoyomi | Iyanuoluwa Shode | Tolulope Adelani | Habiba Abdulganiyu | Abdul-Hakeem Omotayo | Adetola Adeeko | Abeeb Afolabi | Anuoluwapo Aremu | Olanrewaju Samuel | Clemencia Siro | Wangari Kimotho | Onyekachi Ogbu | Chinedu Mbonu | Chiamaka Chukwuneke | Samuel Fanijo | Jessica Ojo | Oyinkansola Awosan | Tadesse Kebede | Toadoum Sari Sakayo | Pamela Nyatsine | Freedmore Sidume | Oreen Yousuf | Mardiyyah Oduwole | Kanda Tshinu | Ussen Kimanuka | Thina Diko | Siyanda Nxakama | Sinodos Nigusse | Abdulmejid Johar | Shafie Mohamed | Fuad Mire Hassan | Moges Ahmed Mehamed | Evrard Ngabire | Jules Jules | Ivan Ssenkungu | Pontus Stenetorp
Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering for African Languages
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
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

African languages have far less in-language content available digitally, making it challenging for question answering systems to satisfy the information needs of users. Cross-lingual open-retrieval question answering (XOR QA) systems – those that retrieve answer content from other languages while serving people in their native language—offer a means of filling this gap. To this end, we create Our Dataset, the first cross-lingual QA dataset with a focus on African languages. Our Dataset includes 12,000+ XOR QA examples across 10 African languages. While previous datasets have focused primarily on languages where cross-lingual QA augments coverage from the target language, Our Dataset focuses on languages where cross-lingual answer content is the only high-coverage source of answer content. Because of this, we argue that African languages are one of the most important and realistic use cases for XOR QA. Our experiments demonstrate the poor performance of automatic translation and multilingual retrieval methods. Overall, Our Dataset proves challenging for state-of-the-art QA models. We hope that the dataset enables the development of more equitable QA technology.

2022

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Bloom Library: Multimodal Datasets in 300+ Languages for a Variety of Downstream Tasks
Colin Leong | Joshua Nemecek | Jacob Mansdorfer | Anna Filighera | Abraham Owodunni | Daniel Whitenack
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We present Bloom Library, a linguistically diverse set of multimodal and multilingual datasets for language modeling, image captioning, visual storytelling, and speech synthesis/recognition. These datasets represent either the most, or among the most, multilingual datasets for each of the included downstream tasks. In total, the initial release of the Bloom Library datasets covers 363 languages across 32 language families. We train downstream task models for various languages represented in the data, showing the viability of the data for future work in low-resource, multimodal NLP and establishing the first known baselines for these downstream tasks in certain languages (e.g., Bisu [bzi], with an estimated population of 700 users). Some of these first-of-their-kind baselines are comparable to state-of-the-art performance for higher-resourced languages. The Bloom Library datasets are released under Creative Commons licenses on the Hugging Face datasets hub to catalyze more linguistically diverse research in the included downstream tasks.
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