Africa has 2000+ languages which are largely un-represented in the NLP forums around the world. Additionally, we have few forums where African NLP researchers can engage and share knowledge. We wish to bring together NLP enthusiasts from around the continent. Let's talk about what's on our minds.

Past Events

2020 Unconference - 10 October 2020

We hosted the 2020 SautiYetu AfricaNLP unconference

Our themes for 2020 were Pushing Boundaries and What are we missing. There is already a lot of energy and ongoing work in the space of AfricaNLP, therefore these themes serve as an opportunity to take stock. As a community, it is imperative that we take a step back and identify ‘what we are missing’ if at all, as this work continues to gather momentum. In addition, what is it that we need to do to further ‘push boundaries’?

Date: 10 October 2020

Where: Online

Themes and topics discussed

• Beginners, participation, and community

• Where are we and where to next

• Datasets

• Translation

• Transfer learning, crosslingual/multilingual language models

• Speech recognition and generation

• Chatbots & Conversational Agents

• Social media, sentiment analysis, text mining, and fake news

Organizers

• Kathleen Siminyu

• Jade Abbott

• Vukosi Marivate

• Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad

The UnConference is supported by COE-MASS - https://www.wits.ac.za/coe-mass/

Ethos

• Share your knowledge and yourself

• Don't pretend to know stuff: Ask if you don't know something

• Be open to learning

• Meet new people

Themes and topics discussed

• NLP Resources (Corpus creation)

• African Language Translation

• African language classification model [Language Identification - LID]

• Social Media and Text Mining

Other topics

• Practical machine learning in Africa

• Africans local languages that have almost no public dataset.

• NLP for non tech people

• Challenges in different languages