arXiv subjects

Seid Muhie Yimam

Publications and source records attributed to Seid Muhie Yimam.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

FASCIST-O-METER: Classifier for Neo-fascist Discourse Online

Neo-fascism is a political and societal ideology that has been having remarkable growth in the last decade in the United States of America (USA), as well as in other Western societies. It poses a grave danger to democracy and the minorities it targets, and it requires active actions against it to avoid escalation. This work presents the first-of-its-kind neo-fascist coding scheme for digital discourse in the USA societal context, overseen by political science researchers. Our work bridges the gap between Natural Language Processing (NLP) and political science against this phenomena. Furthermore, to test the coding scheme, we collect a tremendous amount of activity on the internet from notable neo-fascist groups (the forums of Iron March and Stormfront.org), and the guidelines are applied to a subset of the collected posts. Through crowdsourcing, we annotate a total of a thousand posts that are labeled as neo-fascist or non-neo-fascist. With this labeled data set, we fine-tune and test both Small Language Models (SLMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs), obtaining the very first classification models for neo-fascist discourse. We find that the prevalence of neo-fascist rhetoric in this kind of forum is ever-present, making them a good target for future research. The societal context is a key consideration for neo-fascist speech when conducting NLP research. Finally, the work against this kind of political movement must be pressed upon and continued for the well-being of a democratic society. Disclaimer: This study focuses on detecting neo-fascist content in text, similar to other hate speech analyses, without labeling individuals or organizations.

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arXiv2025

CULEMO: Cultural Lenses on Emotion -- Benchmarking LLMs for Cross-Cultural Emotion Understanding

NLP research has increasingly focused on subjective tasks such as emotion analysis. However, existing emotion benchmarks suffer from two major shortcomings: (1) they largely rely on keyword-based emotion recognition, overlooking crucial cultural dimensions required for deeper emotion understanding, and (2) many are created by translating English-annotated data into other languages, leading to potentially unreliable evaluation. To address these issues, we introduce Cultural Lenses on Emotion (CuLEmo), the first benchmark designed to evaluate culture-aware emotion prediction across six languages: Amharic, Arabic, English, German, Hindi, and Spanish. CuLEmo comprises 400 crafted questions per language, each requiring nuanced cultural reasoning and understanding. We use this benchmark to evaluate several state-of-the-art LLMs on culture-aware emotion prediction and sentiment analysis tasks. Our findings reveal that (1) emotion conceptualizations vary significantly across languages and cultures, (2) LLMs performance likewise varies by language and cultural context, and (3) prompting in English with explicit country context often outperforms in-language prompts for culture-aware emotion and sentiment understanding. The dataset and evaluation code are publicly available.

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arXiv2025

Automatic Speech Recognition for African Low-Resource Languages: Challenges and Future Directions

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technologies have transformed human-computer interaction; however, low-resource languages in Africa remain significantly underrepresented in both research and practical applications. This study investigates the major challenges hindering the development of ASR systems for these languages, which include data scarcity, linguistic complexity, limited computational resources, acoustic variability, and ethical concerns surrounding bias and privacy. The primary goal is to critically analyze these barriers and identify practical, inclusive strategies to advance ASR technologies within the African context. Recent advances and case studies emphasize promising strategies such as community-driven data collection, self-supervised and multilingual learning, lightweight model architectures, and techniques that prioritize privacy. Evidence from pilot projects involving various African languages showcases the feasibility and impact of customized solutions, which encompass morpheme-based modeling and domain-specific ASR applications in sectors like healthcare and education. The findings highlight the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and sustained investment to tackle the distinct linguistic and infrastructural challenges faced by the continent. This study offers a progressive roadmap for creating ethical, efficient, and inclusive ASR systems that not only safeguard linguistic diversity but also improve digital accessibility and promote socioeconomic participation for speakers of African languages.

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arXiv2025

SemEval-2025 Task 11: Bridging the Gap in Text-Based Emotion Detection

We present our shared task on text-based emotion detection, covering more than 30 languages from seven distinct language families. These languages are predominantly low-resource and are spoken across various continents. The data instances are multi-labeled with six emotional classes, with additional datasets in 11 languages annotated for emotion intensity. Participants were asked to predict labels in three tracks: (a) multilabel emotion detection, (b) emotion intensity score detection, and (c) cross-lingual emotion detection. The task attracted over 700 participants. We received final submissions from more than 200 teams and 93 system description papers. We report baseline results, along with findings on the best-performing systems, the most common approaches, and the most effective methods across different tracks and languages. The datasets for this task are publicly available. The dataset is available at SemEval2025 Task 11 https://brighter-dataset.github.io

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arXiv2025

Whispering in Amharic: Fine-tuning Whisper for Low-resource Language

This work explores fine-tuning OpenAI's Whisper automatic speech recognition (ASR) model for Amharic, a low-resource language, to improve transcription accuracy. While the foundational Whisper model struggles with Amharic due to limited representation in its training data, we fine-tune it using datasets like Mozilla Common Voice, FLEURS, and the BDU-speech dataset. The best-performing model, Whispersmall-am, significantly improves when finetuned on a mix of existing FLEURS data and new, unseen Amharic datasets. Training solely on new data leads to poor performance, but combining it with FLEURS data reinforces the model, enabling better specialization in Amharic. We also demonstrate that normalizing Amharic homophones significantly enhances Word Error Rate (WER) and Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) scores. This study underscores the importance of fine-tuning strategies and dataset composition for improving ASR in low-resource languages, providing insights for future Amharic speech recognition research.

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arXiv2025

Exploring Cultural Nuances in Emotion Perception Across 15 African Languages

Understanding how emotions are expressed across languages is vital for building culturally-aware and inclusive NLP systems. However, emotion expression in African languages is understudied, limiting the development of effective emotion detection tools in these languages. In this work, we present a cross-linguistic analysis of emotion expression in 15 African languages. We examine four key dimensions of emotion representation: text length, sentiment polarity, emotion co-occurrence, and intensity variations. Our findings reveal diverse language-specific patterns in emotional expression -- with Somali texts typically longer, while others like IsiZulu and Algerian Arabic show more concise emotional expression. We observe a higher prevalence of negative sentiment in several Nigerian languages compared to lower negativity in languages like IsiXhosa. Further, emotion co-occurrence analysis demonstrates strong cross-linguistic associations between specific emotion pairs (anger-disgust, sadness-fear), suggesting universal psychological connections. Intensity distributions show multimodal patterns with significant variations between language families; Bantu languages display similar yet distinct profiles, while Afroasiatic languages and Nigerian Pidgin demonstrate wider intensity ranges. These findings highlight the need for language-specific approaches to emotion detection while identifying opportunities for transfer learning across related languages.

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arXiv2025

BLEnD: A Benchmark for LLMs on Everyday Knowledge in Diverse Cultures and Languages

Large language models (LLMs) often lack culture-specific knowledge of daily life, especially across diverse regions and non-English languages. Existing benchmarks for evaluating LLMs' cultural sensitivities are limited to a single language or collected from online sources such as Wikipedia, which do not reflect the mundane everyday lifestyles of diverse regions. That is, information about the food people eat for their birthday celebrations, spices they typically use, musical instruments youngsters play, or the sports they practice in school is common cultural knowledge but uncommon in easily collected online sources, especially for underrepresented cultures. To address this issue, we introduce BLEnD, a hand-crafted benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs' everyday knowledge across diverse cultures and languages. BLEnD comprises 52.6k question-answer pairs from 16 countries/regions, in 13 different languages, including low-resource ones such as Amharic, Assamese, Azerbaijani, Hausa, and Sundanese. We construct the benchmark to include two formats of questions: short-answer and multiple-choice. We show that LLMs perform better for cultures that are highly represented online, with a maximum 57.34% difference in GPT-4, the best-performing model, in the short-answer format. For cultures represented by mid-to-high-resource languages, LLMs perform better in their local languages, but for cultures represented by low-resource languages, LLMs perform better in English than the local languages. We make our dataset publicly available at: https://github.com/nlee0212/BLEnD.

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arXiv2025

AfriHate: A Multilingual Collection of Hate Speech and Abusive Language Datasets for African Languages

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 annotated by native speakers familiar with the local culture. We report the challenges related to the construction of the datasets and present various classification baseline results with and without using LLMs. The datasets, individual annotations, and hate speech and offensive language lexicons are available on https://github.com/AfriHate/AfriHate

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arXiv2025

Evaluating the Capabilities of Large Language Models for Multi-label Emotion Understanding

Large Language Models (LLMs) show promising learning and reasoning abilities. Compared to other NLP tasks, multilingual and multi-label emotion evaluation tasks are under-explored in LLMs. In this paper, we present EthioEmo, a multi-label emotion classification dataset for four Ethiopian languages, namely, Amharic (amh), Afan Oromo (orm), Somali (som), and Tigrinya (tir). We perform extensive experiments with an additional English multi-label emotion dataset from SemEval 2018 Task 1. Our evaluation includes encoder-only, encoder-decoder, and decoder-only language models. We compare zero and few-shot approaches of LLMs to fine-tuning smaller language models. The results show that accurate multi-label emotion classification is still insufficient even for high-resource languages such as English, and there is a large gap between the performance of high-resource and low-resource languages. The results also show varying performance levels depending on the language and model type. EthioEmo is available publicly to further improve the understanding of emotions in language models and how people convey emotions through various languages.

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arXiv2024

Multilingual and Explainable Text Detoxification with Parallel Corpora

Even with various regulations in place across countries and social media platforms (Government of India, 2021; European Parliament and Council of the European Union, 2022, digital abusive speech remains a significant issue. One potential approach to address this challenge is automatic text detoxification, a text style transfer (TST) approach that transforms toxic language into a more neutral or non-toxic form. To date, the availability of parallel corpora for the text detoxification task (Logachevavet al., 2022; Atwell et al., 2022; Dementievavet al., 2024a) has proven to be crucial for state-of-the-art approaches. With this work, we extend parallel text detoxification corpus to new languages -- German, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, and Amharic -- testing in the extensive multilingual setup TST baselines. Next, we conduct the first of its kind an automated, explainable analysis of the descriptive features of both toxic and non-toxic sentences, diving deeply into the nuances, similarities, and differences of toxicity and detoxification across 9 languages. Finally, based on the obtained insights, we experiment with a novel text detoxification method inspired by the Chain-of-Thoughts reasoning approach, enhancing the prompting process through clustering on relevant descriptive attributes.

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arXiv2024

Pruning Literals for Highly Efficient Explainability at Word Level

Designing an explainable model becomes crucial now for Natural Language Processing(NLP) since most of the state-of-the-art machine learning models provide a limited explanation for the prediction. In the spectrum of an explainable model, Tsetlin Machine(TM) is promising because of its capability of providing word-level explanation using proposition logic. However, concern rises over the elaborated combination of literals (propositional logic) in the clause that makes the model difficult for humans to comprehend, despite having a transparent learning process. In this paper, we design a post-hoc pruning of clauses that eliminate the randomly placed literals in the clause thereby making the model more efficiently interpretable than the vanilla TM. Experiments on the publicly available YELP-HAT Dataset demonstrate that the proposed pruned TM's attention map aligns more with the human attention map than the vanilla TM's attention map. In addition, the pairwise similarity measure also surpasses the attention map-based neural network models. In terms of accuracy, the proposed pruning method does not degrade the accuracy significantly but rather enhances the performance up to 4% to 9% in some test data.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Hate Speech Detection and Classification in Amharic Text with Deep Learning

Hate speech is a growing problem on social media. It can seriously impact society, especially in countries like Ethiopia, where it can trigger conflicts among diverse ethnic and religious groups. While hate speech detection in resource rich languages are progressing, for low resource languages such as Amharic are lacking. To address this gap, we develop Amharic hate speech data and SBi-LSTM deep learning model that can detect and classify text into four categories of hate speech: racial, religious, gender, and non-hate speech. We have annotated 5k Amharic social media post and comment data into four categories. The data is annotated using a custom annotation tool by a total of 100 native Amharic speakers. The model achieves a 94.8 F1-score performance. Future improvements will include expanding the dataset and develop state-of-the art models. Keywords: Amharic hate speech detection, classification, Amharic dataset, Deep Learning, SBi-LSTM

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arXiv2024

Demarked: A Strategy for Enhanced Abusive Speech Moderation through Counterspeech, Detoxification, and Message Management

Despite regulations imposed by nations and social media platforms, such as recent EU regulations targeting digital violence, abusive content persists as a significant challenge. Existing approaches primarily rely on binary solutions, such as outright blocking or banning, yet fail to address the complex nature of abusive speech. In this work, we propose a more comprehensive approach called Demarcation scoring abusive speech based on four aspect -- (i) severity scale; (ii) presence of a target; (iii) context scale; (iv) legal scale -- and suggesting more options of actions like detoxification, counter speech generation, blocking, or, as a final measure, human intervention. Through a thorough analysis of abusive speech regulations across diverse jurisdictions, platforms, and research papers we highlight the gap in preventing measures and advocate for tailored proactive steps to combat its multifaceted manifestations. Our work aims to inform future strategies for effectively addressing abusive speech online.

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arXiv2024

EthioLLM: Multilingual Large Language Models for Ethiopian Languages with Task Evaluation

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.

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arXiv2024

SemRel2024: A Collection of Semantic Textual Relatedness Datasets for 13 Languages

Exploring and quantifying semantic relatedness is central to representing language and holds significant implications across various NLP tasks. While earlier NLP research primarily focused on semantic similarity, often within the English language context, we instead investigate the broader phenomenon of semantic relatedness. In this paper, we present \textit{SemRel}, a new semantic relatedness dataset collection annotated by native speakers across 13 languages: \textit{Afrikaans, Algerian Arabic, Amharic, English, Hausa, Hindi, Indonesian, Kinyarwanda, Marathi, Moroccan Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Spanish,} and \textit{Telugu}. These languages originate from five distinct language families and are predominantly spoken in Africa and Asia -- regions characterised by a relatively limited availability of NLP resources. Each instance in the SemRel datasets is a sentence pair associated with a score that represents the degree of semantic textual relatedness between the two sentences. The scores are obtained using a comparative annotation framework. We describe the data collection and annotation processes, challenges when building the datasets, baseline experiments, and their impact and utility in NLP.

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arXiv2024

Walia-LLM: Enhancing Amharic-LLaMA by Integrating Task-Specific and Generative Datasets

Large language models (LLMs) have received a lot of attention in natural language processing (NLP) research because of their exceptional performance in understanding and generating human languages. However, low-resource languages are left behind due to the unavailability of resources. In this work, we focus on enhancing the LLaMA-2-Amharic model by integrating task-specific and generative datasets to improve language model performance for Amharic. We compile an Amharic instruction fine-tuning dataset and fine-tuned LLaMA-2-Amharic model. The fine-tuned model shows promising results in different NLP tasks. We open-source our dataset creation pipeline, instruction datasets, trained models, and evaluation outputs to promote language-specific studies on these models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Exploring Boundaries and Intensities in Offensive and Hate Speech: Unveiling the Complex Spectrum of Social Media Discourse

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.

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arXiv2024

SemEval-2024 Task 1: Semantic Textual Relatedness for African and Asian Languages

We present the first shared task on Semantic Textual Relatedness (STR). While earlier shared tasks primarily focused on semantic similarity, we instead investigate the broader phenomenon of semantic relatedness across 14 languages: Afrikaans, Algerian Arabic, Amharic, English, Hausa, Hindi, Indonesian, Kinyarwanda, Marathi, Moroccan Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Punjabi, Spanish, and Telugu. These languages originate from five distinct language families and are predominantly spoken in Africa and Asia -- regions characterised by the relatively limited availability of NLP resources. Each instance in the datasets is a sentence pair associated with a score that represents the degree of semantic textual relatedness between the two sentences. Participating systems were asked to rank sentence pairs by their closeness in meaning (i.e., their degree of semantic relatedness) in the 14 languages in three main tracks: (a) supervised, (b) unsupervised, and (c) crosslingual. The task attracted 163 participants. We received 70 submissions in total (across all tasks) from 51 different teams, and 38 system description papers. We report on the best-performing systems as well as the most common and the most effective approaches for the three different tracks.

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