5th Workshop on African Natural Language Processing (AfricaNLP 2024)

Happy Buzaaba, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Hady Elsahar, Constantine Lignos, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Salomey Osei, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Clemencia Siro, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Perez Ogayo, Israel Abebe Azime, Kayode Olaleye

Workshop Type: Hybrid

Keywords: AfricaNLP, African languages, Generative AI, Low resource

Abstract:

Over 1 billion people live in Africa, and its residents speak more than 2,000 languages. But those languages are among the least represented in NLP research, and work on African languages is often sidelined at major venues. Over the past few years, a vibrant, collaborative community of researchers has formed around a sustained focus on NLP for the benefit of the African continent: national, regional, continental and even global collaborative efforts focused on African languages, African corpora, and tasks with importance in the African context. The AfricaNLP workshops have been a central venue in organizing, sustaining, and growing this focus, and we propose to continue this tradition with an AfricaNLP 2024 workshop in Vienna.

Starting in 2020, the AfricaNLP workshop has become a core event for the African NLP community and has drawn global attendance and interest. Many of the participants are active in the Masakhane grassroots NLP community, allowing the community to convene, showcase and share experiences with each other. Large scale collaborative works have been enabled by participants who joined from the AfricaNLP workshop such as MasakhaNER (61 authors), Quality assessment of Multilingual Datasets (51 authors), Corpora Building for Twi (25 authors), NLP for Ghanaian Languages (25 Authors). Many first-time authors, through the mentorship program, found collaborators and published their first paper. Those mentorship relationships built trust and coherence within the community that continues to this day. We aim to continue this.

In the contemporary AI landscape, generative AI has rapidly expanded with significant input and innovation from the global research community. This technology enables machines to generate novel content, showcases potential across a multitude of sectors. However, underrepresentation of African languages persists within this growth. Recognizing the urgency to address this gap has inspired the theme for the 2024 workshop: Adaptation of Generative AI for African languages which aspires to congregate experts, linguists, and AI enthusiasts to delve into solutions, collaborations, and strategies to amplify the presence of African languages in generative AI models.

Submission Number: 25