AfricaNLP 2024 Workshop
Theme: Adaptation of Generative AI models for African Languages
Co-located with ICLR 2024, May 11th 2024
Messe Wien Exhibition Congress Center, Vienna, Austria
You can find the list of accepted papers on OpenReview at the following link: Accepted papers
About the Workshop
The AfricaNLP workshop has become a core event for the African NLP community and has drawn global attendance and interest for researchers working on African languages, African corpora, and tasks with importance in the African context. AfricaNLP 2024 is being hosted as an ICLR 2024 workshop.
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, showcase potential across a multitude of sectors. However, the under-representation 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. The workshop 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.
The workshop has several aims:
to invite a variety of speakers from industry, research networks and academia to get their perspectives on the development of large language models and how African languages have and have not been represented in this work
to provide a venue to discuss the benefits and potential harms of these language models on the speakers of African languages and African researchers.
to enable positive interaction between academic, industry, and independent researchers around this theme and encourage collaboration and engagement for the benefit of the African continent
to foster further relationships between the African linguistics and NLP communities. It is clear that linguistic input about African languages is key in the evaluation and development of African models
to showcase work being done by the African NLP community and provide a platform to share this expertise with a global audience interested in NLP techniques for low-resource languages
to promote multidisciplinary within the African NLP community with the goal of creating a holistic participatory NLP community that will produce NLP research and technologies that value fairness, ethics, decolonial theory, and data sovereignty
to provide a platform for the groups involved with the various projects to meet, interact, share and forge closer collaboration
to provide a platform for junior researchers to present papers, solutions, and begin interacting with the wider NLP community
to present an opportunity for more experienced researchers to further publicize their work and inspire younger researchers through keynotes and invited talks
This workshop follows the previously successful editions in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023. It will be hybrid and co-located with ICLR2024. No paper will be automatically desk-rejected.
Important Dates
Submission Deadline (Extended): February 11th, 2024 (AoE time)
Acceptance Notifications: March 3rd, 2024 (AoE time)
Camera-ready: April 1, 2024 (AoE time)
Workshop date: May 11th, 2024
Invited Speakers
Graham Neubig
Graham Neubig is an associate professor at the Language Technologies Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on natural language processing, with a particular interest in fundamentals, applications, and understanding of large language models for tasks such as question answering, code generation, and multilingual applications. His final goal is that every person in the world should be able to communicate with each-other, and with computers in their own language. He also contributes to making NLP research more accessible through open publishing of research papers, advanced NLP course materials and video lectures, and open-source software, all of which are available on his web site.
Claytone Sikasote
Claytone Sikasote is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the Hasso-Plattner Institute (HPI) Research School at University of Cape Town (UCT) in Cape Town, South Africa, supervised by Jan Buys and Hussein Suleman. He also serves as a research fellow in the Department of Computer Science at the the University of Zambia. His research interest is in building data-efficient and robust speech recognition and translations models for under-resourced languages. He is also interested in exploring cost-effective and responsible approaches to creating high-quality NLP data resources for under-resourced languages, especially for Zambia.
Ife Adebara
Ife Adebara is a researcher with over seven years of experience in natural language processing (NLP), linguistics, and language policy. She is a member of the Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing Group at UBC and an associate member of the African Languages Technology Initiative (ALT-i) in Nigeria. For her PhD dissertation, Ife developed deep learning technologies for 517 African Languages and engaged in work to make "computers usable in African languages." In her research, Ife advocates for an Afrocentric approach to technology development, to ensure that - what technologies to build, how to build, evaluate, and deploy them are based on the needs of local African communities. She has published her research at top NLP conferences including ACL, EMNLP, COLING, and the LT4ALL conference organized by UNESCO. Ife's work has also been recognized beyond the academic sphere, including media coverage by CBC News, Global News Canada, AMD, and City News Vancouver. Ife's work on AfroLID and Serengeti—a language identification model and Natural Language Understanding Language Model for 517 African languages—received the Top 10 Outstanding Global AI Solutions Award from the IRCAI, under the auspices of UNESCO. Ife's work holds profound implications for AI accessibility in Indigenous languages, preserving cultural heritage, promoting diversity, and inclusion in global discourse.
Akintunde Oladipo
Akintunde Oladipo is a Research Assistant at the David Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo. His research focuses on multilingual natural language processing and information retrieval for African languages, and he has extensive industry experience in machine learning operations.
Pelonomi Moiloa
Pelonomi is CEO of Lelapa AI - A socially grounded research and product lab developing language technology for African languages. Lelapa AI has a mission to enable a noticeable uptick in the quality of life on the African continent. It aspires to do so through expanding the capacity of the African digital economy with resource-efficient language AI. Pelonomi is also a trustee of a girl scholarship fund and director of a community-based NPC. Pelonomi is drawn to the curiosities of community and connection in how they can inform imaginings of a better future, such that we can assist that future in arriving well. An electrical and biomedical engineer by training. TIME 100 most influential people in AI. TED speaker. Bloomberg Catalyst 2023.
Schedule
Organizers
David Ifeoluwa Adelani
Research Fellow, UCL
Bonaventure F. P. Dossou
Ph.D. Student, Mila & McGill
Shamsuddeen Muhammad
Ph.D. Student, UPorto
Atnafu Lambebo Tonja
Ph. D. Student, IPN
Hady Elsahar
Research Scientist, Meta AI
Happy Buzaaba
Postdoc, Princeton University
Aremu Anuoluwapo
Linguist, YorubaNames
Salomey Osei
PhD. student, DeustoTech
Perez Ogayo
Master's student at Carnegie Mellon University's Technologies Institute (LTI).
Kayode Olaleye
Postdoc, University of Pretoria
Israel Abebe Azime
PhD Student UdS
Clemencia Siro
PhD Student at the University of Amsterdam
Constantine Lignos
Assistant Professor
Brandeis University
Program Committee
PC Members
Ignatius Ezeani - Lancaster University, UK
Tosin Adewumi - Luleå University of Technology
Adewale Akinfaderin - Florida State University
Kosisochukwu Madukwe - Victoria University of Wellington
Orevaoghene Ahia - InstaDeep Ltd, Nigeria
Idris Abdulmumin - Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria - Nigeria
Layla El Asri - Borealis AI
Olamilekan Wahab - Independent Researcher
Wisdom d'Almeida - MILA
Surafel M. Lakew - Amazon
Ernie Chang - Saarland University
Wilhelmiena Nekoto - Independent Researcher, Namibia
Mathias Müller - University of Zurich
Amelia Tayor - University of Malawi
Alicia Tsai - Amazon
Rosanne Liu - ML Collective
Isaac Caswell - Google Research
Spandana Gella - Amazon
Musie Meressa - Sapienza University of Rome
Natalie Schluter - Google Brain & IT University Copenhagen
Nouha Dziri - University of Alberta
Michael A Hedderich - Saarland University
Colin Leong - University of Dayton
Chris Emezue - Technical University of Munich
Kathleen Siminyu - Mozilla Foundation
Salomon Kabongo - Leibniz Universität Hannover
Marius Mosbach - Saarland University
Yacine Jernite - HuggingFace
Contacts & Slack Workplace
You're invited to join the Masakhane community slack (channel #africanlp-iclr2024-support) . Meet other participants, find collaborators, mentors and advice there. Organizers will be available on slack to answer questions regarding submissions, format, topics, etc. If you have any doubt whether you can contribute to this workshop (e.g. if you have never written a paper, if you are new to NLP, if you do not have any collaborators, if you do not know LaTeX, etc.), please join the slack and contact us there as well.
To contact the workshop organizers please send an email to: africanlp-ICLR2024@googlegroups.com.
Sponsors
