News
Author: Wiida Fourie-Basson
Published: 28/04/2021
From Khoekhoegowab to Igbo and Sepedi – these are only three of the low-resource languages in Africa that a group of over 400 volunteers from more than 20 African countries are targeting to address the lack of diversity in the field of natural language processing.
Natural language processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence that helps computers understand, interpret and manipulate human language. But while Africa has more than 2000 living languages, most of these have very little data, making it difficult to develop speech and language technologies relevant to the African context. Hence the term low-resource languages.