Morocco

We present Kunkado, a 160-hour Bambara ASR dataset compiled from Malian radio archives to capture present-day spontaneous speech across a wide range of topics. It includes code-switching, disfluencies, background noise, and overlapping speakers that practical ASR systems encounter in real-world use. We finetuned Parakeet-based models on a 33.47-hour human-reviewed subset and apply pragmatic transcript normalization to reduce variability in number formatting, tags, and code-switching annotations. Evaluated on two real-world test sets, finetuning with Kunkado reduces WER from 44.47\% to 37.12\% on one and from 36.07\% to 32.33\% on the other. In human evaluation, the resulting model also outperforms a comparable system with the same architecture trained on 98 hours of cleaner, less realistic speech. We release the data and models to support robust ASR for predominantly oral languages.

EACL 2026 Main Conference

Kunnafonidilaw ka Cadeau: an ASR dataset of present-day Bambara

realistic data

radio broadcast

bambara

automatic speech recognition

dataset

workshop paper

#### *Message from the General Chair, Aline Villavicencio*
I’m delighted and honoured to welcome you to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026), taking place in the beautiful city of Rabat, in Morocco, in March 24-29, 2026. EACL is the flagship European conference of the Association and EACL 2026 proudly continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity. I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers whose dedication, generosity, and tireless efforts have made this conference possible.
For the first time EACL is being hosted in the African continent. This is an important milestone for our community, and we are grateful to our Moroccan hosts for enabling this historic moment by bringing this edition of EACL to Rabat. We are also delighted that the Second Arabic NLP School is co-located with EACL. We hope attendees enjoy this wonderful opportunity to strengthen ties with the Computational Linguistics communities across the African continent. *[Read full message](https://drive.google.com/file/d/14NlmHvwM6fPJuMmOvVh7K0vtQbEyv3SZ/view?usp=sharing)*<br><br>

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Welcome to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). EACL 2026 will be held in Rabat, Morocco, from March 24–29, 2026. 

Most of the more than 40 languages spoken in Togo lack the data and tools necessary for modern natural language processing (NLP) applications. We present an extension of previous work by introducing new datasets, improved models, and a community-driven evaluation benchmark for text-to-speech (TTS). We expanded the Eyaa-Tom multilingual corpus with additional speech data (e.g. 26.9k recordings, 30.9 hours) across 10 local languages and incorporated Mozilla Common Voice contributions (64.6k clips, 46.6 hours) for Adja, Nawdm, Mina, Tem to strengthen automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech synthesis. We detail how community contributors (including collaboration with a national TV journalist) helped collect and validate the Kabiyɛ and French text, with an ethical compensation model in place. We also try to compare the performance of a few models in these datasets, we fine-tuned state-of-the-art models in these data for ASR, OpenAI Whisper and faster-whisper were benchmarked achieving improved word error rates after fine-tuning; for machine translation, we fine-tuned Meta's NLLB-200 model in 11 local languages, which produced significant BLEU/METEOR gains especially in Ewɛ, and Kabɩyɛ. To evaluate TTS, we introduce Lom Bench, a new community-based benchmark where native speakers rate synthetic speech. The preliminary results from Lom Bench indicate promising naturalness in Ewɛ and Kabɩyɛ TTS, although further data is needed.

Eyaa-Tom 26, Yodi-Mantissa and Lom Bench: A Community Benchmark for TTS in Local Languages

In this work, we present AfriNLLB, a series of lightweight models for efficient translation from and into African languages. AfriNLLB supports 15 language pairs (30 translation directions), including Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, Amharic, Somali, Zulu, Lingala, Afrikaans, Wolof, and Egyptian Arabic, as well as other African Union official languages such as Arabic (MSA), French, Portuguese, and Spanish. Our training data covers bidirectional translation between English and 13 languages, and between French and two languages (Lingala and Wolof). 

AfriNLLB models are based on NLLB-200. We compress the NLLB-200 600M with two approaches, iterative layer pruning and quantization. Our work aims at enabling efficient deployment of translation models for African languages in resource-constrained settings. 
Our evaluation results demonstrate that AfriNLLB models achieve performance comparable to the baseline while being over 20\% times faster. We release two versions of the AfriNLLB models, a Transformers version that allows further fine-tuning and a CTranslate2 version for efficient inference. Moreover, we release all the training data that we curated for fine-tuning the baseline and pruned models to facilitate further research.

AfriNLLB: Efficient Translation Models for African Languages

Large language models are extremely sensitive to prompt design, a phenomenon which is amplified in multilingual scenarios especially with low-resource languages due to low coverage in model training data, orthographic variation and tokenization issues.
In this work, we evaluate a reflective prompt evaluation technique (GEPA) as an inference time optimization strategy on multiple multilingual benchmarks spanning various African languages.
Using a more capable model as a reflection model and operating under strict optimization budgets - we show that reflective prompt optimization enables inference time improvements through textual policy evolution resulting in consistent improvements on different tasks without any weight updates. 

Our evaluation mostly focuses on closed-source models and we observe that on some of the benchmarks, prompt-optimized smaller models can outperform better and more recent models highlighting the importance of instruction design for measuring the capabilities of a language model on a given task.
Qualitative review of model outputs before and after optimization also shows that prompt evolution not only reinforces models ability to perform a particular task, it also improves output formatting which is very important for proper model evaluation.
We characterize the resulting prompt-latency tradeoff by quantifying the optimization cost in terms of prompt token growth, and our results show that modest increase in prompt size can result in substantial gains in performance. Finally, we argue that benchmark evaluations should report prompt-optimized results alongside baseline prompts in order to properly reflect model capabilities for low-resource languages.

What Do Prompts Reveal About Model Capabilities in Low-Resource Languages?

BambaraMLLM is a unified multilingual multimodal large language model (MMLLM) designed to address the critical lack of digital resources for Bambara, a West African language spoken by over 15 million people. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on task-specific models for different linguistic functions, BambaraMLLM integrates text generation, automatic speech recognition (ASR), machine translation (MT), and text-to-tpeech (TTS) synthesis into a single, transformer-based architecture. This work establishes a scalable, open-source foundation for African language technology, optimizing for both performance and deployment under resource constraints.

BambaraMLLM: A Unified Multilingual Multimodal Large Language Model for Comprehensive Bambara Language Processing

This paper presents a Multilingual Vision Large Language Model, named M-MiniGPT4. Our model exhibits strong vision-language understanding (VLU) capabilities across 40+ languages. We utilize a mixture of native multilingual and translated data to push the multilingual VLU performance of the MiniGPT4 architecture. In addition, we propose a multilingual alignment training stage that uses parallel text corpora to further enhance the multilingual capabilities of our model. M-MiniGPT4 achieves 36\% accuracy on the multilingual MMMU benchmark, which is competitive with the English MMMU scores of state-of-the-art models in the same weight class. We open-source our models, code, and translated datasets to facilitate future research in low-resource and multilingual settings.

M-MiniGPT4: Multilingual VLLM Alignment via Translated Data

This preliminary work addresses the critical gap in multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) for African languages, which remain underrepresented despite their rich multimodal communication traditions. We propose a framework that leverages simulated multimodal data and cross-lingual transfer learning to bootstrap multimodal capabilities. Our initial experiments with Swahili demonstrate that proxy multimodal embeddings can be effectively generated using pre-trained encoders, achieving an average cosine similarity of 0.72 for culturally relevant concepts. We further show that simple fusion methods can effectively combine these embeddings, and that transfer learning from high-resource languages yields a 28% improvement in multimodal alignment over zero-shot approaches. These results validate the feasibility of our approach and provide a foundation for culturally-aware multimodal LLMs in low-resource African language contexts.

Towards Multimodal Cultural Context Modeling for African Languages in Large Language Models

Low-resource languages serve as invaluable repositories of human history, preserving cultural and intellectual diversity. Despite their significance, they remain largely absent from modern natural language processing systems. While progress has been made for widely spoken African languages like Swahili, Yoruba, and Amharic, smaller indigenous languages such as Efik continue to be underrepresented in machine translation research. This study evaluates the effectiveness of AI-based models in translating between English and Efik, leveraging a small-scale, community-curated parallel corpus. We fine-tuned the mT5 multilingual model on our manually curated $N = 13{,}865$ sentence parallel corpus. The model achieved a BLEU score of $15.61$ and a chrF score of $35.04$, demonstrating reasonable translation performance for a low-resource language. Our work demonstrates the feasibility of developing practical machine translation tools for low-resource languages and highlights the importance of inclusive data practices and culturally grounded evaluation in advancing equitable NLP.

Developing an English–Efik Corpus and Machine Translation System for Digitization Inclusion

Despite serving over 100 million speakers as a vital African lingua franca, Swahili remains critically under-resourced for Natural Language Processing, hindering technological progress across East Africa. We present a scalable solution: a controllable synthetic data generation pipeline that produces culturally grounded Swahili text for sentiment analysis, validated through automated LLM judges. To ensure reliability, we conduct targeted human evaluation with a native Swahili speaker on a stratified sample, achieving 80.95% agreement between generated sentiment labels and human ground truth, with strong agreement on judge quality assessments. This demonstrates that LLM-based generation and quality assessment can transfer effectively to low-resource languages. We release a dataset and provide a reproducible pipeline in tandem providing ample knowledge and working material for NLP researchers in low-resource contexts.

Synthetic Data Generation Pipeline for Low-Resource Swahili Sentiment Analysis: Multi-LLM Judging with Human Validation

Lemmatization, which reduces words to their
root forms, plays a key role in tasks such as information retrieval, text indexing, and machine
learning-based language models. However, a
key research challenge for low-resourced languages such as the Somali is the lack of humanannotated lemmatization datasets and reliable
ground truth to underpin accurate morphological analysis and training relevant NLP models. To address this problem, we developed the
first large-scale, purpose-built Somali lemmatization lexicon, coupled with a crowdsourcing
platform for ongoing expansion. The system
leverages Somali’s agglutinative and derivational morphology, encompassing over 5,584
root words and 78,629 derivative forms, each
annotated with part-of-speech tags. For data
validation purpose, we have devised a pilot
lexicon based lemmatizer integrated with rulebased logic to handle out-of-vocabulary terms.
Evaluation on a 294-document corpus spanning news articles, social media posts, and
short messages shows lemmatization accuracies of 51.27% for full articles, 44.14% for
excerpts, and 59.51% for short texts such as
tweets. These results demonstrate that combining lexical resources, POS tagging, and rulebased strategies provides a robust and scalable
framework for addressing morphological complexity in Somali and other low-resource languages

Morphologically-informed Somali Lemmatization Corpus built with a Web-based Crowdsourcing Platform

Text-to-Speech (TTS) technology offers potential to improve exam accessibility for visually impaired learners, but existing systems often underperform in underrepresented languages like Yoruba. This study evaluates current Yoruba TTS models in delivering standardized exam content to five visually impaired students through a web-based interface. Before testing, four Yoruba TTS systems were compared; only Facebook’s mms-tts-yor and YarnGPT produced intelligible Yoruba speech. Students experienced exam questions delivered by human voice, Braille, and TTS. All preferred Braille for clarity and independence, some valued human narration, while TTS was least favored due to robotic and unclear output. These results reveal a significant gap between TTS capabilities and the needs of users in low-resource languages. The paper highlights the urgency of developing tone-aware, user-centered TTS solutions to ensure equitable access to digital education for visually impaired speakers of underrepresented languages

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Eyaa-Tom 26, Yodi-Mantissa and Lom Bench: A Community Benchmark for TTS in Local Languages

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