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Storytelling, music and spoken word for Palestine in Portsmouth | Morning Star https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/storytelling-music-and-spoken-word-palestine-portsmouth

Natural language processing for African languages
David Ifeoluwa Adelani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00297 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.…

Natural language processing for African languages
Recent advances in word embeddings and language models use large-scale, unlabelled data and self-supervised learning to boost NLP performance. Multilingual models, often trained on web-sourced data like Wikipedia, face challenges: few low-resource languages are included, their data is often noisy, and lack of labeled datasets makes it hard to evaluate performance outside high-resource languages like English. In this dissertation, we focus on languages spoken in Sub-Saharan Africa where all the …

#CFP: Meeting at the Crossroads: Understanding the Intersection of Rhetoric, Race, and Religion
https://ift.tt/BRQ0Ya6
Laurent Pernot wrote, “Religion is intimately linked with words. Everyone knows that the spoken…

#CFP: Meeting at the Crossroads: Understanding the Intersection of Rhetoric, Race, and Religion
Laurent Pernot wrote, “Religion is intimately linked with words. Everyone knows that the spoken and written word plays an essential role in religion, as language is necessarily used to address the gods or God, to speak about the divine or the sacred, and to express religious feeling or awareness”. Thus, Pernot called for an understanding of the role rhetoric plays in our expression and performance of religion.

Audio-Aware Large Language Models as Judges for Speaking Styles
Cheng-Han Chiang, Xiaofei Wang, Chung-Ching Lin, Kevin Lin, Linjie Li, Radu Kopetz, Yao Qian, Zhendong Wang, Zhengyuan Yang, Hung-yi Lee, Lijuan Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05984

Audio-Aware Large Language Models as Judges for Speaking Styles
Audio-aware large language models (ALLMs) can understand the textual and non-textual information in the audio input. In this paper, we explore using ALLMs as an automatic judge to assess the speaking styles of speeches. We use ALLM judges to evaluate the speeches generated by SLMs on two tasks: voice style instruction following and role-playing. The speaking style we consider includes emotion, volume, speaking pace, word emphasis, pitch control, and non-verbal elements. We use four spoken langu…

Hello Afrika: Speech Commands in Kinyarwanda
George Igwegbe, Martins Awojide, Mboh Bless, Nirel Kadzo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01024 https://

Hello Afrika: Speech Commands in Kinyarwanda
Voice or Speech Commands are a subset of the broader Spoken Word Corpus of a language which are essential for non-contact control of and activation of larger AI systems in devices used in everyday life especially for persons with disabilities. Currently, there is a dearth of speech command models for African languages. The Hello Afrika project aims to address this issue and its first iteration is focused on the Kinyarwanda language since the country has shown interest in developing speech recog…

#CFP: Meeting at the Crossroads: Understanding the Intersection of Rhetoric, Race, and Religion #acrel #Religidons #AARSBL

#CFP: Meeting at the Crossroads: Understanding the Intersection of Rhetoric, Race, and Religion
Laurent Pernot wrote, “Religion is intimately linked with words. Everyone knows that the spoken and written word plays an essential role in religion, as language is necessarily used to address the gods or God, to speak about the divine or the sacred, and to express religious feeling or awareness”. Thus, Pernot called for an understanding of the role rhetoric plays in our expression and performance of religion.