Related papers: AI4D -- African Language Dataset Challenge

Advances in speech and language technologies enable tools such as voice-search, text-to-speech, speech recognition and machine translation. These are however only available for high resource languages like English, French or Chinese.…

In Africa, the scarcity of computational resources and medical datasets remains a major hurdle to the development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in clinical settings, further contributing to global bias. These…

Africa's rich linguistic diversity remains significantly underrepresented in speech technologies, creating barriers to digital inclusion. To alleviate this challenge, we systematically map the continent's speech space of datasets and…

Unlike major Western languages, most African languages are very low-resourced. Furthermore, the resources that do exist are often scattered and difficult to obtain and discover. As a result, the data and code for existing research has…

This study examines the digital representation of African languages and the challenges this presents for current language detection tools. We evaluate their performance on Yoruba, Kinyarwanda, and Amharic. While these languages are spoken…

The Igbo language is facing a risk of becoming endangered, as indicated by a 2025 UNESCO study. This highlights the need to develop language technologies for Igbo to foster communication, learning and preservation. To create robust,…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technologies have transformed human-computer interaction; however, low-resource languages in Africa remain significantly underrepresented in both research and practical applications. This study…

The advancement of speech technology has predominantly favored high-resource languages, creating a significant digital divide for speakers of most Sub-Saharan African languages. To address this gap, we introduce WAXAL, a large-scale, openly…

Despite representing nearly one-third of the world's languages, African languages remain critically underserved by modern NLP technologies, with 88\% classified as severely underrepresented or completely ignored in computational…

Across the African continent, students grapple with various educational challenges, including limited access to essential resources such as computers, internet connectivity, reliable electricity, and a shortage of qualified teachers.…

Almost none of the 2,000+ languages spoken in Africa have widely available automatic speech recognition systems, and the required data is also only available for a few languages. We have experimented with two techniques which may provide…

The advancement of speech technologies has been remarkable, yet its integration with African languages remains limited due to the scarcity of African speech corpora. To address this issue, we present AfroDigits, a minimalist,…

Speech technologies are transforming interactions across various sectors, from healthcare to call centers and robots, yet their performance on African-accented conversations remains underexplored. We introduce Afrispeech-Dialog, a benchmark…

Despite advances in large language model capabilities in recent years, a large gap remains in their capabilities and safety performance for many languages beyond a relatively small handful of globally dominant languages. This paper provides…

Developing Information Retrieval (IR) tools and techniques in African languages suffers from the dual problems of a lack of algorithms and very small test data collections. This affects the creation of practical IR systems and limits the…

This paper maps Africa's distinctive AI risk profile, from deepfake fuelled electoral interference and data colonial dependency to compute scarcity, labour disruption and disproportionate exposure to climate driven environmental costs.…

It is a well-known fact that current AI-based language technology -- language models, machine translation systems, multilingual dictionaries and corpora -- focuses on the world's 2-3% most widely spoken languages. Recent research efforts…

How can language learning systems be developed for languages that lack sufficient training resources? This challenge is increasingly faced by developers across the African continent who aim to build AI systems capable of understanding and…

In spite of the recent progress in speech processing, the majority of world languages and dialects remain uncovered. This situation only furthers an already wide technological divide, thereby hindering technological and socioeconomic…

In multilingual societies, social conversations often involve code-mixed speech. The current speech technology may not be well equipped to extract information from multi-lingual multi-speaker conversations. The DISPLACE challenge entails a…