UCREL Corpus Research Seminar

University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language

Computing & Communications | Linguistics and English Language

Advances in NLP for African Languages

Bonaventure Dossou¹ & Chris Emezue²

¹Mila Quebec AI Institute  ²Mila Quebec AI

"Language is inherent and compulsory for human communication. Whether expressed written, spoken, or signed, language ensures understanding between people of the same and different regions. African languages (over 2000) are complex and truly low-resourced. These languages receive minimal attention: the datasets required for NLP applications are difficult to discover and existing research is hard to reproduce. However, this is changing. With the growing awareness and effort to include more low-resourced languages in NLP research, African languages have recently been a major subject of research in natural language processing. The presentation is the story of the dynamic duo, Chris and Bonaventure, as they work towards tackling the NLP challenges facing African languages. The talk will cover a range of topics with a focus on the OkwuGbé end-to-end speech recognition system for Fon and Igbo."

Week 7 2021/2022

Thursday 25th November 2021
1:00-2:00pm

Microsoft Teams - request a link via email

Chris and Bona are members of the Masakhane Community (https://www.masakhane.io/)