Related papers: Machine Intelligence in Africa: a survey
African languages are numerous, complex and low-resourced. The datasets required for machine translation are difficult to discover, and existing research is hard to reproduce. Minimal attention has been given to machine translation for…
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its data-centric branch of machine learning (ML) have greatly evolved over the last few decades. However, as AI is used increasingly in real world use cases, the importance of the interpretability of and…
The artificial intelligence (AI) digital divide in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) presents significant disparities in AI access, adoption, and development due to varying levels of infrastructure, education, and policy support. This study…
This chapter seeks to frame the elemental and invisible problems of AI and big data in the African context by examining digital sites and infrastructure through the lens of power and interests. It will present reflections on how these sites…
Over the years, there have been campaigns to include the African languages in the growing research on machine translation (MT) in particular, and natural language processing (NLP) in general. Africa has the highest language diversity, with…
According to the latest World Economic Forum report, about 70% of the African population depends on agriculture for their livelihood. This makes agriculture a critical sector within the African continent. Nonetheless, agricultural…
With over 2,000 languages and potentially millions of speakers, Africa represents one of the richest linguistic regions in the world. Yet, this diversity is scarcely reflected in state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) systems…
Recent advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) has led to the proliferation of large pretrained language models. These models have been shown to yield good performance, using in-context learning, even on unseen tasks and…
With growing machine learning (ML) applications in healthcare, there have been calls for fairness in ML to understand and mitigate ethical concerns these systems may pose. Fairness has implications for global health in Africa, which already…
Machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) and other modern statistical methods are providing new opportunities to operationalize previously untapped and rapidly growing sources of data for patient benefit. Whilst there is a lot of…
Labor plays a major, albeit largely unrecognized role in the development of artificial intelligence. Machine learning algorithms are predicated on data-intensive processes that rely on humans to execute repetitive and difficult-to-automate,…
Computer vision is a broad field of study that encompasses different tasks (e.g., object detection). Although computer vision is relevant to the African communities in various applications, yet computer vision research is under-explored in…
For many of the 700 million illiterate people around the world, speech recognition technology could provide a bridge to valuable information and services. Yet, those most in need of this technology are often the most underserved by it. In…
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.…
Pretrained language models (PLMs) for African languages are continually improving, but the reasons behind these advances remain unclear. This paper presents the first systematic investigation into probing PLMs for linguistic knowledge about…
Research in NLP lacks geographic diversity, and the question of how NLP can be scaled to low-resourced languages has not yet been adequately solved. "Low-resourced"-ness is a complex problem going beyond data availability and reflects…
Africa has over 2000 languages. Despite this, African languages account for a small portion of available resources and publications in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This is due to multiple factors, including: a lack of focus from…
While global AI development prioritizes model performance and computational scale, meaningful deployment in African markets requires fundamentally different architectural decisions. This paper introduces Contextual and Cultural Intelligence…
There is an ongoing debate on balancing the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence (AI) as AI is becoming critical to improving healthcare delivery and patient outcomes. Such improvements are essential in resource-constrained…
The rise of digital technology has dramatically increased the potential for cyberbullying and online abuse, necessitating enhanced measures for detection and prevention, especially among children. This study focuses on detecting abusive…