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

Ife Adebara, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed


Abstract
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 what technologies to build and how to build, evaluate, and deploy them based on the needs of local African communities.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.265
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3814–3841
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.265
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.265
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ife Adebara and Muhammad Abdul-Mageed. 2022. Towards Afrocentric NLP for African Languages: Where We Are and Where We Can Go. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3814–3841, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Afrocentric NLP for African Languages: Where We Are and Where We Can Go (Adebara & Abdul-Mageed, ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.265.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.265.mp4