Cracking the Language Barrier for a Multilingual Africa, 2021

This webinar series will be hosted by the International Research Centre in Artificial Intelligence (IRCAI) and supported by UNESCO and Knowledge 4 All Foundation, to present the Fellowship to develop datasets and strengthen capacities and innovation potential for Low Resource African Languages project that is composed of research in natural language processing, open dataset creation and publishing, and the development of an interface between policy and technology sphere. The project delivered three main components from research in natural language processing, dataset creation, and policy creation:

1. Fellowship for African AI researchers focused on African languages, based on previously IDRC and Knowledge 4 All Foundation funded work on language datasets. This work contributes to a roadmap for better integration of African languages on digital platforms in aid of lowering the barrier for African participation in the digital economy,

2. Improvement of the representation of AI research carried out on African languages by creating resources for a variety of NLP tasks and in a variety of African languages that will enable good, data-driven results in AI research,

3. Attract an African community of native speakers as contributors of language resources and language technology tools to adopt and support Masakhane NLP, a platform for sharing, maintaining and making use of language resources and tools; establishing widely agreed benchmarks for NLP tasks and stimulating competition between methods and systems,

4. Be used as a model case to inform African evidence-based policymaking concerning Artificial Intelligence and will be included in UNESCO’s AI Decision maker’s Essential to inform policymakers.

Find more information at IRCAI Webinar Series