Africa
A New Pair of GloVes
Carlson, Riley, Bauer, John, Manning, Christopher D.
This report documents, describes, and evaluates new 2024 English GloVe (Global Vectors for Word Representation) models. While the original GloVe models built in 2014 have been widely used and found useful, languages and the world continue to evolve and we thought that current usage could benefit from updated models. Moreover, the 2014 models were not carefully documented as to the exact data versions and preprocessing that were used, and we rectify this by documenting these new models. We trained two sets of word embeddings using Wikipedia, Gigaword, and a subset of Dolma. Evaluation through vocabulary comparison, direct testing, and NER tasks shows that the 2024 vectors incorporate new culturally and linguistically relevant words, perform comparably on structural tasks like analogy and similarity, and demonstrate improved performance on recent, temporally dependent NER datasets such as non-Western newswire data.
AI-based Clinical Decision Support for Primary Care: A Real-World Study
Korom, Robert, Kiptinness, Sarah, Adan, Najib, Said, Kassim, Ithuli, Catherine, Rotich, Oliver, Kimani, Boniface, King'ori, Irene, Kamau, Stellah, Atemba, Elizabeth, Aden, Muna, Bowman, Preston, Sharman, Michael, Hicks, Rebecca Soskin, Distler, Rebecca, Heidecke, Johannes, Arora, Rahul K., Singhal, Karan
We evaluate the impact of large language model-based clinical decision support in live care. In partnership with Penda Health, a network of primary care clinics in Nairobi, Kenya, we studied AI Consult, a tool that serves as a safety net for clinicians by identifying potential documentation and clinical decision-making errors. AI Consult integrates into clinician workflows, activating only when needed and preserving clinician autonomy. We conducted a quality improvement study, comparing outcomes for 39,849 patient visits performed by clinicians with or without access to AI Consult across 15 clinics. Visits were rated by independent physicians to identify clinical errors. Clinicians with access to AI Consult made relatively fewer errors: 16% fewer diagnostic errors and 13% fewer treatment errors. In absolute terms, the introduction of AI Consult would avert diagnostic errors in 22,000 visits and treatment errors in 29,000 visits annually at Penda alone. In a survey of clinicians with AI Consult, all clinicians said that AI Consult improved the quality of care they delivered, with 75% saying the effect was "substantial". These results required a clinical workflow-aligned AI Consult implementation and active deployment to encourage clinician uptake. We hope this study demonstrates the potential for LLM-based clinical decision support tools to reduce errors in real-world settings and provides a practical framework for advancing responsible adoption.
Disaster Informatics after the COVID-19 Pandemic: Bibliometric and Topic Analysis based on Large-scale Academic Literature
Tran, Ngan, Chen, Haihua, Cleveland, Ana, Zhou, Yuhan
This study presents a comprehensive bibliometric and topic analysis of the disaster informatics literature published between January 2020 to September 2022. Leveraging a large-scale corpus and advanced techniques such as pre-trained language models and generative AI, we identify the most active countries, institutions, authors, collaboration networks, emergent topics, patterns among the most significant topics, and shifts in research priorities spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings highlight (1) countries that were most impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic were also among the most active, with each country having specific research interests, (2) countries and institutions within the same region or share a common language tend to collaborate, (3) top active authors tend to form close partnerships with one or two key partners, (4) authors typically specialized in one or two specific topics, while institutions had more diverse interests across several topics, and (5) the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced research priorities in disaster informatics, placing greater emphasis on public health. We further demonstrate that the field is converging on multidimensional resilience strategies and cross-sectoral data-sharing collaborations or projects, reflecting a heightened awareness of global vulnerability and interdependency. Collecting and quality assurance strategies, data analytic practices, LLM-based topic extraction and summarization approaches, and result visualization tools can be applied to comparable datasets or solve similar analytic problems. By mapping out the trends in disaster informatics, our analysis offers strategic insights for policymakers, practitioners, and scholars aiming to enhance disaster informatics capacities in an increasingly uncertain and complex risk landscape.
TyDi QA-WANA: A Benchmark for Information-Seeking Question Answering in Languages of West Asia and North Africa
Riley, Parker, Shakeri, Siamak, Ammar, Waleed, Clark, Jonathan H.
We present TyDi QA-WANA, a question-answering dataset consisting of 28K examples divided among 10 language varieties of western Asia and northern Africa. The data collection process was designed to elicit information-seeking questions, where the asker is genuinely curious to know the answer. Each question in paired with an entire article that may or may not contain the answer; the relatively large size of the articles results in a task suitable for evaluating models' abilities to utilize large text contexts in answering questions. Furthermore, the data was collected directly in each language variety, without the use of translation, in order to avoid issues of cultural relevance. We present performance of two baseline models, and release our code and data to facilitate further improvement by the research community.
Homo naledi's burial practices could change what it means to be human
From a young age, the inevitability and finality of death becomes a shaping force in our lives. Indeed, it could be said that our ability to recognise our eventual demise and the grief that comes with losing those close to us are core elements of what it means to be human. They have also led to symbolic practices that have deep roots in human culture. We have long assumed that Homo sapiens was the only human species to have gained an awareness of the mortality of living things. But as we report in "What were ancient humans thinking when they began to bury their dead?",
Automated Design of Structured Variational Quantum Circuits with Reinforcement Learning
Turati, Gloria, Foderà, Simone, Nembrini, Riccardo, Dacrema, Maurizio Ferrari, Cremonesi, Paolo
Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs) are among the most promising approaches for leveraging near-term quantum hardware, yet their effectiveness strongly depends on the design of the underlying circuit ansatz, which is typically constructed with heuristic methods. In this work, we represent the synthesis of variational quantum circuits as a sequential decision-making problem, where gates are added iteratively in order to optimize an objective function, and we introduce two reinforcement learning-based methods, RLVQC Global and RLVQC Block, tailored to combinatorial optimization problems. RLVQC Block creates ansatzes that generalize the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), by discovering a two-qubits block that is applied to all the interacting qubit pairs. While RLVQC Global further generalizes the ansatz and adds gates unconstrained by the structure of the interacting qubits. Both methods adopt the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm and use empirical measurement outcomes as state observations to guide the agent. We evaluate the proposed methods on a broad set of QUBO instances derived from classical graph-based optimization problems. Our results show that both RLVQC methods exhibit strong results with RLVQC Block consistently outperforming QAOA and generally surpassing RLVQC Global. While RLVQC Block produces circuits with depth comparable to QAOA, the Global variant is instead able to find significantly shorter ones. These findings suggest that reinforcement learning methods can be an effective tool to discover new ansatz structures tailored for specific problems and that the most effective circuit design strategy lies between rigid predefined architectures and completely unconstrained ones, offering a favourable trade-off between structure and adaptability.
ReDi: Rectified Discrete Flow
Yoo, Jaehoon, Kim, Wonjung, Hong, Seunghoon
Discrete Flow-based Models (DFMs) are powerful generative models for high-quality discrete data but typically suffer from slow sampling speeds due to their reliance on iterative decoding processes. This reliance on a multi-step process originates from the factorization approximation of DFMs, which is necessary for handling high-dimensional data. In this paper, we rigorously characterize the approximation error from factorization using Conditional Total Correlation (TC), which depends on the coupling. To reduce the Conditional TC and enable efficient few-step generation, we propose Rectified Discrete Flow (ReDi), a novel iterative method that reduces factorization error by rectifying the coupling between source and target distributions. We theoretically prove that each ReDi step guarantees a monotonic decreasing Conditional TC, ensuring its convergence. Empirically, ReDi significantly reduces Conditional TC and enables few-step generation. Moreover, we demonstrate that the rectified couplings are well-suited for training efficient one-step models on image generation. ReDi offers a simple and theoretically grounded approach for tackling the few-step challenge, providing a new perspective on efficient discrete data synthesis. Code is available at https://github.com/Ugness/ReDi_discrete
mRAKL: Multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Knowledge Graph Construction for Low-Resourced Languages
Nigatu, Hellina Hailu, Li, Min, ter Hoeve, Maartje, Potdar, Saloni, Chasins, Sarah
Knowledge Graphs represent real-world entities and the relationships between them. Multilingual Knowledge Graph Construction (mKGC) refers to the task of automatically constructing or predicting missing entities and links for knowledge graphs in a multilingual setting. In this work, we reformulate the mKGC task as a Question Answering (QA) task and introduce mRAKL: a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) based system to perform mKGC. We achieve this by using the head entity and linking relation in a question, and having our model predict the tail entity as an answer. Our experiments focus primarily on two low-resourced languages: Tigrinya and Amharic. We experiment with using higher-resourced languages Arabic and English for cross-lingual transfer. With a BM25 retriever, we find that the RAG-based approach improves performance over a no-context setting. Further, our ablation studies show that with an idealized retrieval system, mRAKL improves accuracy by 4.92 and 8.79 percentage points for Tigrinya and Amharic, respectively.
SenWiCh: Sense-Annotation of Low-Resource Languages for WiC using Hybrid Methods
Goworek, Roksana, Karlcut, Harpal, Shezad, Muhammad, Darshana, Nijaguna, Mane, Abhishek, Bondada, Syam, Sikka, Raghav, Mammadov, Ulvi, Allahverdiyev, Rauf, Purighella, Sriram, Gupta, Paridhi, Ndegwa, Muhinyia, Dubossarsky, Haim
This paper addresses the critical need for high-quality evaluation datasets in low-resource languages to advance cross-lingual transfer. While cross-lingual transfer offers a key strategy for leveraging multilingual pretraining to expand language technologies to understudied and typologically diverse languages, its effectiveness is dependent on quality and suitable benchmarks. We release new sense-annotated datasets of sentences containing polysemous words, spanning ten low-resource languages across diverse language families and scripts. To facilitate dataset creation, the paper presents a demonstrably beneficial semi-automatic annotation method. The utility of the datasets is demonstrated through Word-in-Context (WiC) formatted experiments that evaluate transfer on these low-resource languages. Results highlight the importance of targeted dataset creation and evaluation for effective polysemy disambiguation in low-resource settings and transfer studies. The released datasets and code aim to support further research into fair, robust, and truly multilingual NLP.
Mind the Gap: Evaluating the Representativeness of Quantitative Medical Language Reasoning LLM Benchmarks for African Disease Burdens
Mutisya, Fred, Gitau, Shikoh, Syovata, Christine, Oigara, Diana, Matende, Ibrahim, Aden, Muna, Ali, Munira, Nyotu, Ryan, Marion, Diana, Nyangena, Job, Ongoma, Nasubo, Mbae, Keith, Wamicha, Elizabeth, Mibuari, Eric, Nsengemana, Jean Philbert, Chidede, Talkmore
Introduction: Existing medical LLM benchmarks largely reflect examination syllabi and disease profiles from high income settings, raising questions about their validity for African deployment where malaria, HIV, TB, sickle cell disease and other neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) dominate burden and national guidelines drive care. Methodology: We systematically reviewed 31 quantitative LLM evaluation papers (Jan 2019 May 2025) identifying 19 English medical QA benchmarks. Alama Health QA was developed using a retrieval augmented generation framework anchored on the Kenyan Clinical Practice Guidelines. Six widely used sets (AfriMedQA, MMLUMedical, PubMedQA, MedMCQA, MedQAUSMLE, and guideline grounded Alama Health QA) underwent harmonized semantic profiling (NTD proportion, recency, readability, lexical diversity metrics) and blinded expert rating across five dimensions: clinical relevance, guideline alignment, clarity, distractor plausibility, and language/cultural fit. Results: Alama Health QA captured >40% of all NTD mentions across corpora and the highest within set frequencies for malaria (7.7%), HIV (4.1%), and TB (5.2%); AfriMedQA ranked second but lacked formal guideline linkage. Global benchmarks showed minimal representation (e.g., sickle cell disease absent in three sets) despite large scale. Qualitatively, Alama scored highest for relevance and guideline alignment; PubMedQA lowest for clinical utility. Discussion: Quantitative medical LLM benchmarks widely used in the literature underrepresent African disease burdens and regulatory contexts, risking misleading performance claims. Guideline anchored, regionally curated resources such as Alama Health QA and expanded disease specific derivatives are essential for safe, equitable model evaluation and deployment across African health systems.