Towards Afrocentric NLP for African Languages: Where We Are and Where We Can Go

Ife Adebara; Muhammad Abdul-Mageed

Towards Afrocentric NLP for African Languages: Where We Are and Where We Can Go

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arxiv 2203.08351 v2 pith:ZRUBUWO5 submitted 2022-03-16 cs.CL cs.AI

Ife Adebara , Muhammad Abdul-Mageed This is my paper · ORCID

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keywords languagesafricanafrocentricbuildcommunitiesdevelopmentdiscusstechnologies

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Aligning with ACL 2022 special Theme on "Language Diversity: from Low Resource to Endangered Languages", we discuss the major linguistic and sociopolitical challenges facing development of NLP technologies for African languages. Situating African languages in a typological framework, we discuss how the particulars of these languages can be harnessed. To facilitate future research, we also highlight current efforts, communities, venues, datasets, and tools. Our main objective is to motivate and advocate for an Afrocentric approach to technology development. With this in mind, we recommend \textit{what} technologies to build and \textit{how} to build, evaluate, and deploy them based on the needs of local African communities.

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Amplify Initiative: Building A Localized Data Platform for Globalized AI
cs.HC 2025-04 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

Amplify's pilot with 155 experts produced an annotated dataset of 8,091 adversarial queries in seven languages, intended to evaluate AI safety and cultural relevance in Sub-Saharan Africa.

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