Grassroots NLP community Masakhane wins Wikimedia Foundation Research of the Year Award

Grassroots NLP community Masakhane wins Wikimedia Foundation Research of the Year Award

Masakhane, a grassroots organisation which aims to strengthen and encourage Natural Language Processing (NLP) research in African languages for Africans by Africans was in April awarded the Wikimedia Research Award of the Year for its paper Participatory Research for Lowresourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languages.

Masakhane received the award together with Kay Zhu, Dylan Walker and Lev Muchnik for their paper Content Growth and Attention Contagion in Information Networks: Addressing Information Poverty on Wikipedia. The award was presented virtually to Masakhane by Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Walles.

Machine Translation (MT) is crucial for information accessibility and communication worldwide. Despite this, MT is still centred around a few highresources languages, widely excluding African languages.