Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging and Named Entity Recognition (NER) are fundamental tasks within the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), serving as essential prerequisites for a multitude of downstream applications. POS tagging, the process of assigning grammatical categories to individual words within a sentence (e.g., noun, verb, adjective, adverb), provides crucial syntactic information that underpins higher-level language understanding. NER, on the contrary, focuses on identifying and classifying named entities - real-world objects that are designated with a proper name - into predefined semantic categories such as persons, organizations, locations, dates, times, and quantities [1, 2]. The synergy of POS and NER tagging empowers a wide spectrum of NLP applications. In information extraction, NER helps to pinpoint key entities, while POS tags help to understand the relationships between these entities and other words in the text, facilitating the extraction of structured information from unstructured text [3]. Machine translation systems benefit from POS tagging to improve syntactic analysis and word order prediction, and NER to ensure accurate translation of named entities in languages [4]. Question-answer systems rely on both NER and POS to understand the question's intent, identify relevant entities and relationships in the knowledge base, and formulate accurate answers. Text summarization algorithms leverage NER to identify salient entities and POS tags to preserve grammatical coherence and readability in summaries.

With over 500 languages in Nigeria, three languages -- Hausa, Yor\`ub\'a and Igbo -- spoken by over 175 million people, account for about 60% of the spoken languages. However, these languages are categorised as low-resource due to insufficient resources to support tasks in computational linguistics. Several research efforts and initiatives have been presented, however, a coherent understanding of the state of Natural Language Processing (NLP) - from grammatical formalisation to linguistic resources that support complex tasks such as language understanding and generation is lacking. This study presents the first comprehensive review of advancements in low-resource NLP (LR-NLP) research across the three major Nigerian languages (NaijaNLP). We quantitatively assess the available linguistic resources and identify key challenges. Although a growing body of literature addresses various NLP downstream tasks in Hausa, Igbo, and Yor\`ub\'a, only about 25.1% of the reviewed studies contribute new linguistic resources. This finding highlights a persistent reliance on repurposing existing data rather than generating novel, high-quality resources. Additionally, language-specific challenges, such as the accurate representation of diacritics, remain under-explored. To advance NaijaNLP and LR-NLP more broadly, we emphasise the need for intensified efforts in resource enrichment, comprehensive annotation, and the development of open collaborative initiatives.

However, most of the world's languages, often referred to as "low-resource languages", still remain either not supported or insufficiently supported due to the limited availability of data and language resources, and market, economic, and global inequality factors. Mali, a multilingual country with 13 official languages, including Bamanankan (Bambara), Bomu, Bozo, Dɔgɔsɔ (Dogon), Fulfulde (Fula), Hassaniya Arabic, Mamara (Minyanka), Maninka, Soninke, Sɔõɔy (Songhay), Senara, Tàmàsàyt (Tamasheq) and Xaasongaxanno (Kassonke), faces severe challenges in digital inclusion limiting economic development, educational advancement, and preservation of cultural heritage (Bird, 2020; Nekoto et al., 2020). These languages share in common a penury of language resources needed to train AI and NLP systems which could play a role in lessening the digital divide (Hammarström et al., 2018). This penury extends from severe in the case of a language like Bambara which has very limited resources to catastrophic for languages like Bomu and Bozo with an almost complete absence of language resources. The need for innovative methods for low-resource languages has spawned varied strategies, such as transfer learning, zero-shot learning, and pre-trained models in related languages (Ruder, 2021; Adelani et al., 2022).

Does neural machine translation yield translations that are congenial with common sense? In this paper, we present a test suite to evaluate the commonsense reasoning capability of neural machine translation. The test suite consists of three test sets, covering lexical and contextless/contextual syntactic ambiguity that requires commonsense knowledge to resolve. We manually create 1,200 triples, each of which contain a source sentence and two contrastive translations, involving 7 different common sense types. Language models pretrained on large-scale corpora, such as BERT, GPT-2, achieve a commonsense reasoning accuracy of lower than 72% on target translations of this test suite. We conduct extensive experiments on the test suite to evaluate commonsense reasoning in neural machine translation and investigate factors that have impact on this capability. Our experiments and analyses demonstrate that neural machine translation performs poorly on commonsense reasoning of the three ambiguity types in terms of both reasoning accuracy (60.1%) and reasoning consistency (31%). The built commonsense test suite is available at https://github.com/tjunlp-lab/CommonMT.

We present FourierNAT, a novel non-autoregressive Transformer (NAT) architecture that employs Fourier-based mixing in the decoder to generate output sequences in parallel. While traditional NAT approaches often face challenges with capturing global dependencies, our method leverages a discrete Fourier transform to mix token embeddings across the entire sequence dimension, coupled with learned frequency-domain gating. This allows the model to efficiently propagate context without explicit autoregressive steps. Empirically, FourierNAT achieves competitive results against leading NAT baselines on standard benchmarks like WMT machine translation and CNN/DailyMail summarization, providing significant speed advantages over autoregressive Transformers. We further demonstrate that learned frequency-domain parameters allow the model to adaptively focus on long-range or short-range dependencies, partially mitigating the well-known coherence gaps in one-pass NAT generation. Overall, FourierNAT highlights the potential of integrating spectral-domain operations to accelerate and improve parallel text generation. This approach can potentially provide great computational and time savings in inference tasks LLMs.

Most existing work in data selection for In-Context Learning (ICL) has focused on constructing demonstrations from ground truth annotations, with limited attention given to selecting reliable self-generated annotations. In this work, we propose a three-step semi-supervised ICL framework: annotation generation, demonstration selection, and semi-supervised inference. Our baseline, Naive-SemiICL, which prompts select high-confidence self-generated demonstrations for ICL prompting, outperforms a 16-shot baseline by an average of 9.94% across 16 datasets. We further introduce IterPSD, an annotation approach that refines pseudo-demonstrations iteratively, achieving up to 6.8% additional gains in classification tasks. Lastly, we reveal a scaling law for semi-supervised ICL, where models achieve optimal performance with over 1,000 demonstrations.

Word-level quality estimation (QE) detects erroneous spans in machine translations, which can direct and facilitate human post-editing. While the accuracy of word-level QE systems has been assessed extensively, their usability and downstream influence on the speed, quality and editing choices of human post-editing remain understudied. Our QE4PE study investigates the impact of word-level QE on machine translation (MT) post-editing in a realistic setting involving 42 professional post-editors across two translation directions. We compare four error-span highlight modalities, including supervised and uncertainty-based word-level QE methods, for identifying potential errors in the outputs of a state-of-the-art neural MT model. Post-editing effort and productivity are estimated by behavioral logs, while quality improvements are assessed by word- and segment-level human annotation. We find that domain, language and editors' speed are critical factors in determining highlights' effectiveness, with modest differences between human-made and automated QE highlights underlining a gap between accuracy and usability in professional workflows.

Simultaneous translation of unbounded streaming speech remains a challenging problem due to the need for effectively processing the history speech context and past translations so that quality and latency, including computation overhead, can be balanced. Most prior works assume pre-segmented speech, limiting their real-world applicability. In this paper, we propose InfiniSST, a novel approach that formulates SST as a multi-turn dialogue task, enabling seamless translation of unbounded speech. We construct translation trajectories and robust segments from MuST-C with multi-latency augmentation during training and develop a key-value (KV) cache management strategy to facilitate efficient inference. Experiments on MuST-C En-Es, En-De, and En-Zh demonstrate that InfiniSST reduces computation-aware latency by 0.5 to 1 second while maintaining the same translation quality compared to baselines. Ablation studies further validate the contributions of our data construction and cache management strategy. We release the code at https://github.com/LeiLiLab/InfiniSST

As speech translation (ST) systems become increasingly prevalent, understanding their vulnerabilities is crucial for ensuring robust and reliable communication. However, limited work has explored this issue in depth. This paper explores methods of compromising these systems through imperceptible audio manipulations. Specifically, we present two innovative approaches: (1) the injection of perturbation into source audio, and (2) the generation of adversarial music designed to guide targeted translation, while also conducting more practical over-the-air attacks in the physical world. Our experiments reveal that carefully crafted audio perturbations can mislead translation models to produce targeted, harmful outputs, while adversarial music achieve this goal more covertly, exploiting the natural imperceptibility of music. These attacks prove effective across multiple languages and translation models, highlighting a systemic vulnerability in current ST architectures. The implications of this research extend beyond immediate security concerns, shedding light on the interpretability and robustness of neural speech processing systems. Our findings underscore the need for advanced defense mechanisms and more resilient architectures in the realm of audio systems. More details and samples can be found at https://adv-st.github.io.

Accurate translation of bug reports is critical for efficient collaboration in global software development. In this study, we conduct the first comprehensive evaluation of machine translation (MT) performance on bug reports, analyzing the capabilities of DeepL, AWS Translate, and ChatGPT using data from the Visual Studio Code GitHub repository, specifically focusing on reports labeled with the english-please tag. To thoroughly assess the accuracy and effectiveness of each system, we employ multiple machine translation metrics, including BLEU, BERTScore, COMET, METEOR, and ROUGE. Our findings indicate that DeepL consistently outperforms the other systems across most automatic metrics, demonstrating strong lexical and semantic alignment. AWS Translate performs competitively, particularly in METEOR, while ChatGPT lags in key metrics. This study underscores the importance of domain adaptation for translating technical texts and offers guidance for integrating automated translation into bug-triaging workflows. Moreover, our results establish a foundation for future research to refine machine translation solutions for specialized engineering contexts. The code and dataset for this paper are available at GitHub: https://github.com/av9ash/gitbugs/tree/main/multilingual.