AI4D -- African Language Dataset Challenge
This tackles the lack of fundamental digital resources for African languages, which is an incremental effort to bridge the digital divide.
The paper addresses the growing digital divide for African languages by organizing the AI4D - African Language Dataset Challenge to incentivize the creation and discovery of annotated datasets for supervised machine learning models.
As language and speech technologies become more advanced, the lack of fundamental digital resources for African languages, such as data, spell checkers and Part of Speech taggers, means that the digital divide between these languages and others keeps growing. This work details the organisation of the AI4D - African Language Dataset Challenge, an effort to incentivize the creation, organization and discovery of African language datasets through a competitive challenge. We particularly encouraged the submission of annotated datasets which can be used for training task-specific supervised machine learning models.