Large language models (LLMs) have gained popularity recently due to their outstanding performance in various downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, low-resource languages are still lagging behind current state-of-the-art (SOTA) developments in the field of NLP due to insufficient resources to train LLMs. Ethiopian languages exhibit remarkable linguistic diversity, encompassing a wide array of scripts, and are imbued with profound religious and cultural significance. This paper introduces EthioLLM – multilingual large language models for five Ethiopian languages (Amharic, Ge’ez, Afan Oromo, Somali, and Tigrinya) and English, and Ethiobenchmark – a new benchmark dataset for various downstream NLP tasks. We evaluate the performance of these models across five downstream NLP tasks. We open-source our multilingual language models, new benchmark datasets for various downstream tasks, and task-specific fine-tuned language models and discuss the performance of the models. Our dataset and models are available at the https://huggingface.co/EthioNLP repository.

In contemporary society, the proliferation of hate speech is increasingly prevalent across various social media platforms, with a notable trend of incorporating memes to amplify its visual impact and reach. The conventional text-based detection approaches frequently fail to address the complexities introduced by memes, thereby aggravating the challenges, particularly in low-resource languages such as Amharic. We develop Amharic meme hate speech detection models using 2,000 memes collected from Facebook, Twitter, and Telegram over four months. We employ native Amharic speakers to annotate each meme using a web-based tool, yielding a Fleiss’ kappa score of 0.50. We utilize different feature extraction techniques, namely VGG16 for images and word2Vec for textual content, and build unimodal and multimodal models such as LSTM, BiLSTM, and CNN. The BiLSTM model shows the best performance, achieving 63% accuracy for text and 75% for multimodal features. In image-only experiments, the CNN model achieves 69% in accuracy. Multimodal models demonstrate superior performance in detecting Amharic hate speech in memes, showcasing their potential to address the unique challenges posed by meme-based hate speech on social media.

The prevalence of digital media and evolving sociopolitical dynamics have significantly amplified the dissemination of hateful content. Existing studies mainly focus on classifying texts into binary categories, often overlooking the continuous spectrum of offensiveness and hatefulness inherent in the text. In this research, we present an extensive benchmark dataset for Amharic, comprising 8,258 tweets annotated for three distinct tasks: category classification, identification of hate targets, and rating offensiveness and hatefulness intensities. Our study highlights that a considerable majority of tweets belong to the less offensive and less hate intensity levels, underscoring the need for early interventions by stakeholders. The prevalence of ethnic and political hatred targets, with significant overlaps in our dataset, emphasizes the complex relationships within Ethiopia’s sociopolitical landscape. We build classification and regression models and investigate the efficacy of models in handling these tasks. Our results reveal that hate and offensive speech can not be addressed by a simplistic binary classification, instead manifesting as variables across a continuous range of values. The afro-XLMR-large model exhibits the best performances achieving F1-scores of 75.30%, 70.59%, and 29.42% for the category, target, and regression tasks, respectively. The 80.22% correlation coefficient of the Afro-XLMR-large model indicates strong alignments.

We present the first Africentric SemEval Shared task, Sentiment Analysis for African Languages (AfriSenti-SemEval) - The dataset is available at https://github.com/afrisenti-semeval/afrisent-semeval-2023. AfriSenti-SemEval is a sentiment classification challenge in 14 African languages: Amharic, Algerian Arabic, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Moroccan Arabic, Mozambican Portuguese, Nigerian Pidgin, Oromo, Swahili, Tigrinya, Twi, Xitsonga, and Yorb (Muhammad et al., 2023), using data labeled with 3 sentiment classes. We present three subtasks: (1) Task A: monolingual classification, which received 44 submissions; (2) Task B: multilingual classification, which received 32 submissions; and (3) Task C: zero-shot classification, which received 34 submissions. The best performance for tasks A and B was achieved by NLNDE team with 71.31 and 75.06 weighted F1, respectively. UCAS-IIE-NLP achieved the best average score for task C with 58.15 weighted F1. We describe the various approaches adopted by the top 10 systems and their approaches.

The rise of social media eases the spread of hateful content, especially racist content with severe consequences. In this paper, we analyze the tweets targeting the death of George Floyd in May 2020 as the event accelerated debates on racism globally. We focus on the tweets published in French for a period of one month since the death of Floyd. Using the Yandex Toloka platform, we annotate the tweets into categories as hate, offensive or normal. Tweets that are offensive or hateful are further annotated as racial or non-racial. We build French hate speech detection models based on the multilingual BERT and CamemBERT and apply transfer learning by fine-tuning the HateXplain model. We compare different approaches to resolve annotation ties and find that the detection model based on CamemBERT yields the best results in our experiments.

In this paper, we present a study of efficient data selection and annotation strategies for Amharic hate speech. We also build various classification models and investigate the challenges of hate speech data selection, annotation, and classification for the Amharic language. From a total of over 18 million tweets in our Twitter corpus, 15.1k tweets are annotated by two independent native speakers, and a Cohen’s kappa score of 0.48 is achieved. A third annotator, a curator, is also employed to decide on the final gold labels. We employ both classical machine learning and deep learning approaches, which include fine-tuning AmFLAIR and AmRoBERTa contextual embedding models. Among all the models, AmFLAIR achieves the best performance with an F1-score of 72%. We publicly release the annotation guidelines, keywords/lexicon entries, datasets, models, and associated scripts with a permissive license.

This survey delves into the current state of natural language processing (NLP) for four Ethiopian languages: Amharic, Afaan Oromo, Tigrinya, and Wolaytta. Through this paper, we identify key challenges and opportunities for NLP research in Ethiopia.Furthermore, we provide a centralized repository on GitHub that contains publicly available resources for various NLP tasks in these languages. This repository can be updated periodically with contributions from other researchers. Our objective is to disseminate information to NLP researchers interested in Ethiopian languages and encourage future research in this domain.