@inproceedings{alabi-etal-2025-charting,
title = "Charting the Landscape of {A}frican {NLP}: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Ahead",
author = "Alabi, Jesujoba Oluwadara and
Hedderich, Michael A. and
Adelani, David Ifeoluwa and
Klakow, Dietrich",
editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos and
Chakraborty, Tanmoy and
Rose, Carolyn and
Peng, Violet",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = nov,
year = "2025",
address = "Suzhou, China",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1414/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1414",
pages = "27807--27841",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6",
abstract = "With over 2,000 languages and potentially millions of speakers, Africa represents one of the richest linguistic regions in the world. Yet, this diversity is scarcely reflected in state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) systems and large language models (LLMs), which predominantly support a narrow set of high-resource languages. This exclusion not only limits the reach and utility of modern NLP technologies but also risks widening the digital divide across linguistic communities. Nevertheless, NLP research on African languages is active and growing. In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in this area, driven by several factors{---}including the creation of multilingual language resources, the rise of community-led initiatives, and increased support through funding programs. In this survey, we analyze 884 research papers on NLP for African languages published over the past five years, offering a comprehensive overview of recent progress across core tasks. We identify key trends shaping the field and conclude by outlining promising directions to foster more inclusive and sustainable NLP research for African languages."
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<abstract>With over 2,000 languages and potentially millions of speakers, Africa represents one of the richest linguistic regions in the world. Yet, this diversity is scarcely reflected in state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) systems and large language models (LLMs), which predominantly support a narrow set of high-resource languages. This exclusion not only limits the reach and utility of modern NLP technologies but also risks widening the digital divide across linguistic communities. Nevertheless, NLP research on African languages is active and growing. In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in this area, driven by several factors—including the creation of multilingual language resources, the rise of community-led initiatives, and increased support through funding programs. In this survey, we analyze 884 research papers on NLP for African languages published over the past five years, offering a comprehensive overview of recent progress across core tasks. We identify key trends shaping the field and conclude by outlining promising directions to foster more inclusive and sustainable NLP research for African languages.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Charting the Landscape of African NLP: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Ahead
%A Alabi, Jesujoba Oluwadara
%A Hedderich, Michael A.
%A Adelani, David Ifeoluwa
%A Klakow, Dietrich
%Y Christodoulopoulos, Christos
%Y Chakraborty, Tanmoy
%Y Rose, Carolyn
%Y Peng, Violet
%S Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2025
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Suzhou, China
%@ 979-8-89176-332-6
%F alabi-etal-2025-charting
%X With over 2,000 languages and potentially millions of speakers, Africa represents one of the richest linguistic regions in the world. Yet, this diversity is scarcely reflected in state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) systems and large language models (LLMs), which predominantly support a narrow set of high-resource languages. This exclusion not only limits the reach and utility of modern NLP technologies but also risks widening the digital divide across linguistic communities. Nevertheless, NLP research on African languages is active and growing. In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in this area, driven by several factors—including the creation of multilingual language resources, the rise of community-led initiatives, and increased support through funding programs. In this survey, we analyze 884 research papers on NLP for African languages published over the past five years, offering a comprehensive overview of recent progress across core tasks. We identify key trends shaping the field and conclude by outlining promising directions to foster more inclusive and sustainable NLP research for African languages.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1414
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1414/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1414
%P 27807-27841
Markdown (Informal)
[Charting the Landscape of African NLP: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Ahead](https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1414/) (Alabi et al., EMNLP 2025)
ACL