A Review on NLP Approaches for African Languages and Dialects

Kamel Gaanoun, Naira abdou mohamed, Anass Allak, Imade Benelallam

Abstract: In Africa, there are several linguistic and dialect bundles composed mainly by young people. These youths are excluded from technologies involving their mother tongues. Most research on Natural Language Processing (NLP) tends to focus on languages with large corpora, such as English, Spanish, or other European languages. Although this “well representation” is not perceived in African Languages, this is not the only reason that justifies the “poor representation” of these languages in the field of NLP instead of European Languages. Additionally, the globalization of the latter until their adoption in some African countries created a lack of consideration of the local populations toward their native idioms, and the non-standardization of these idioms makes their use quite problematic. However, salutary initiatives and effective works have attempted to find solutions that consider the lack of data and particular properties of African Languages. This paper presents a review of current methods focused on them while emphasizing their limits and proposing thoughts on potential solutions.