Towards Afrocentric NLP for African Languages: Where We Are and Where We Can Go
It tackles the problem of language diversity and low-resource NLP for African communities, but is incremental as it synthesizes existing efforts and proposes directions.
The paper addresses the challenges in developing NLP technologies for African languages and advocates for an Afrocentric approach, recommending specific technologies and methods based on local community needs.
Aligning with ACL 2022 special Theme on "Language Diversity: from Low Resource to Endangered Languages", we discuss the major linguistic and sociopolitical challenges facing development of NLP technologies for African languages. Situating African languages in a typological framework, we discuss how the particulars of these languages can be harnessed. To facilitate future research, we also highlight current efforts, communities, venues, datasets, and tools. Our main objective is to motivate and advocate for an Afrocentric approach to technology development. With this in mind, we recommend \textit{what} technologies to build and \textit{how} to build, evaluate, and deploy them based on the needs of local African communities.