AfricaNLP Workshop @ ICLR 2023
PROJECT
Fiscal Host: Masakhane
To raise funds to sponsor individuals to attend the AfricaNLP Workshop @ ICLR 2023 in Rwanda
About
Over 1 billion people live in Africa, and its residents speak more than 2,000 languages. But those languages are among the least represented in NLP research, and work on African languages is often sidelined at major venues. In 2022, the wave of large language models built through collaborative networks and large investments in compute has come to the shores of African languages. This year has seen the release of large multilingual models such as BLOOM and NLLB-200 for machine translation. While those models have been publicly open-sourced, their impact on the community of African NLP researchers is yet to be assessed and deserves to be a matter of wider discussion. This has inspired the theme for the 2023 workshop: African NLP in the Era of Large Language Models.
We want to ensure that as many African NLP researchers can attend this workshop. This is a RARE opportunity for us to get many people at an event such as ICLR due to how friendly RWANDAs VISA regulations are. We welcome all donations!
We want to ensure that as many African NLP researchers can attend this workshop. This is a RARE opportunity for us to get many people at an event such as ICLR due to how friendly RWANDAs VISA regulations are. We welcome all donations!
The workshop has several aims
- to invite a variety of speakers from industry, research networks and academia to get their perspectives on the development of large language models and how African languages have and have not been represented in this work
- to provide a venue to discuss the benefits and potential harms of these language models on the speakers of African languages and African researchers.
- to enable positive interaction between academic, industry, and independent researchers around this theme and encourage collaboration and engagement for the benefit of the African continent
- to foster further relationships between the African linguistics and NLP communities. It is clear that linguistic input about African languages is key in the evaluation and development of African models
- to showcase work being done by the African NLP community and provide a platform to share this expertise with a global audience interested in NLP techniques for low-resource languages
- to promote multidisciplinarity within the African NLP community with the goal of creating a holistic participatory NLP community that will produce NLP research and technologies that value fairness, ethics, decolonial theory, and data sovereignty
- to provide a platform for the groups involved with the various projects to meet, interact, share and forge closer collaboration
- to provide a platform for junior researchers to present papers, solutions, and begin interacting with the wider NLP community
- to present an opportunity for more experienced researchers to further publicize their work and inspire younger researchers through keynotes and invited talks
Topics will include, but are not limited to:
- analyses of African languages by means of computational linguistics
- empirical studies reporting results from applying or adapting NLP developed for high-resource languages to African languages
- new model architectures tailored for African languages
- new corpora for African languages
- using NLP techniques on African datasets
- methods addressing out-of-domain generalization for NLP tasks with training data in very limited domains
- transfer learning between African languages or from higher-resourced to lower-resourced languages
- challenges or solutions for resource gathering for African NLP tasks
- crowd-sourcing and open-sourcing software for African NLP
- multidisciplinary and participatory research in African NLP
- tutorials for African NLP for education or development purposes
- development of NLP systems for African languages for production
- socio-linguistic research for African languages and their decolonisation
- ethical considerations for African NLP
Our team
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