Building NLP for African Languages: The Masakane Movement

While at EMNLP 2022, Daniel got a chance to sit down with an amazing group of researchers creating NLP technology that actually works for their local language communities. Just Zwennicker (Universiteit van Amsterdam) discusses his work on a machine translation system for Sranan Tongo, a creole language that is spoken in Suriname. Andiswa Bukula (SADiLaR), Rooweither Mabuya (SADiLaR), and Bonaventure Dossou (Lanfrica, Mila) discuss their work with Masakhane to strengthen and spur NLP research in African languages, for Africans, by Africans.

The group emphasized the need for more linguistically diverse NLP systems that work in scenarios of data scarcity, non-Latin scripts, rich morphology, etc. You don’t want to miss this one!

Featuring:

• Just Zwennicker – LinkedIn
• Andiswa Bukula – X
• Rooweither Mabuya – X
• Bonaventure Dossou – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

EMNLP 2022 papers from the guests:

• Towards a general purpose machine translation system for Sranantongo
• MasakhaNER 2.0: Africa-centric Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognition
• AfroLM: A Self-Active Learning-based Multilingual Pretrained Language Model for 23 African Languages

Other links relevant to the discussion:

• Masakhane
• Lanfrica
• The South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR)

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