Where Are We At with Automatic Speech Recognition for the Bambara Language?

This paper introduces the first standardized benchmark for evaluating Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in the Bambara language, utilizing one hour of professionally recorded Malian constitutional text. Designed as a controlled reference set under near-optimal acoustic and linguistic conditions, the benchmark was used to evaluate 37 models, ranging from Bambara-trained systems to large-scale commercial models. Our findings reveal that current ASR performance remains significantly below deployment standards in a narrow formal domain; the top-performing system in terms of Word Error Rate (WER) achieved 46.76\% and the best Character Error Rate (CER) of 13.00\% was set by another model, while several prominent multilingual models exceeded 100\% WER. These results suggest that multilingual pre-training and model scaling alone are insufficient for underrepresented languages. Furthermore, because this dataset represents a best-case scenario of the most simplified and formal form of spoken Bambara, these figures are yet to be tested against practical, real-world settings. We provide the benchmark and an accompanying public leaderboard to facilitate transparent evaluation and future research in Bambara speech technology.

NSL-MT: Linguistically Informed Negative Samples for Efficient Machine Translation in Low-Resource Languages

We introduce Negative Space Learning MT (NSL-MT), a training method that teaches models what not to generate by encoding linguistic constraints as severity-weighted penalties in the loss function. NSL-MT increases limited parallel data with synthetically generated violations of target language grammar, explicitly penalizing the model when it assigns high probability to these linguistically invalid outputs. We demonstrate that NSL-MT delivers improvements across all architectures: 3-12\% BLEU gains for well-performing models and 56-89\% gains for models lacking descent initial support. Furthermore, NSL-MT provides a 5x data efficiency multiplier -- training with 1,000 examples matches or exceeds normal training with 5,000 examples. Thus, NSL-MT provides a data-efficient alternative training method for settings where there is limited annotated parallel corporas.

Grammatical Error Correction for Low-Resource Languages: The Case of Zarma

Grammatical error correction (GEC) is important for improving written materials for low-resource languages like Zarma -- spoken by over 5 million people in West Africa. Yet it remains a challenging problem. This study compares rule-based methods, machine translation (MT) models, and large language models (LLMs) for GEC in Zarma. We evaluate each approach's effectiveness on our manually-built dataset of over 250,000 examples using synthetic and human-annotated data. Our experiments show that the MT-based approach using the M2M100 model outperforms others, achieving a detection rate of 95.82% and a suggestion accuracy of 78.90% in automatic evaluations, and scoring 3.0 out of 5.0 in logical/grammar error correction during MEs by native speakers. The rule-based method achieved perfect detection (100%) and high suggestion accuracy (96.27%) for spelling corrections but struggled with context-level errors. LLMs like MT5-small showed moderate performance with a detection rate of 90.62% and a suggestion accuracy of 57.15%. Our work highlights the potential of MT models to enhance GEC in low-resource languages, paving the way for more inclusive NLP tools.

Feriji: A French-Zarma Parallel Corpus, Glossary & Translator

Machine translation (MT) is a rapidly expanding field that has experienced significant advancements in recent years with the development of models capable of translating multiple languages with remarkable accuracy. However, the representation of African languages in this field still needs to improve due to linguistic complexities and limited resources. This applies to the Zarma language, a dialect of Songhay (of the Nilo-Saharan language family) spoken by over 5 million people across Niger and neighboring countries \cite{lewis2016ethnologue}. This paper introduces Feriji, the first robust French-Zarma parallel corpus and glossary designed for MT. The corpus, containing 61,085 sentences in Zarma and 42,789 in French, and a glossary of 4,062 words represent a significant step in addressing the need for more resources for Zarma. We fine-tune three large language models on our dataset, obtaining a BLEU score of 30.06 on the best-performing model. We further evaluate the models on human judgments of fluency, comprehension, and readability and the importance and impact of the corpus and models. Our contributions help to bridge a significant language gap and promote an essential and overlooked indigenous African language.