In this talk, Jade Abbott introduces Masakhane, a grassroots NLP community in Africa, by Africans.
In spite of the fact that 30% of all living languages today are African languages, there is very limited focus and research put into these languages. For example, most countries in Africa use English, French or Portuguese as their official languages. She goes on to mention that there is a glaring gap that exists when it comes to resources on African languages which proves difficult for AI researches working on NLP projects.
She believes that African languages have a lot to offer the NLP community because of their diversity and complexity
So what is Masakhane and how do they hope to impact research and innovation around African languages? As a community, they have three goals;
- FOR AFRICA: To build a community of NLP researchers, connect and grow it, spurring and sharing further research to enable language preservation, tool building and increase its global visibility and relevance
- FOR NLP RESEARCH: To build data sets and tools to facilitate NLP research on African languages, and to pose new research problems to enrich the NLP research landscape
- FOR RESEARCH COMMUNITIES: To discover best practices for distributed research, to be applied by other emerging research communities
Learn more about this community and their work by listening to her presentation: Masakhane Machine Translation for Africa by Jade Abbott · Apr 26, 2020 · ICLR 2020
This talk was delivered in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia at the ICLR 2020 “AfricaNLP Workshop – Putting Africa on the NLP Map” via the AI4D Africa program with support from IDRC, Sida and Knowledge 4 All Foundation