LANGUAGE RESOURCE
LAUNCH OF LANAFRICA CONNECTING ALL AFRICAN LANGUAGE RESOURCES, ONE RECORD AT A TIME / Read original article here /
After winning the UNESCO #VivaTech2021 challenge, Chris Emezue and I, are happy to announce that Lanfrica is officially launched.
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anfrica aims to mitigate the difficulty encountered in the discovery of African language resources by creating a centralized, language-first catalog. For instance, if you’re looking for resources (linguistic datasets or research papers) in a particular African language, Lanfrica will point you to the different sources on the web that have such datasets in the desired language. In the deficient case, we adopt a participatory approach by allowing you to contribute (with papers, datasets). Read more about the motivation and scope of Lanfrica in our About section.
This gives Lanfrica, a huge potential for better discoverability and representation of African languages on the web. Lanfrica is able to give useful statistics on the progress of African languages. As a simple illustration, from the language filter section, you get an immediate overview of the number of existing natural language processing (NLP) resources for each African language. Based on
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this, one can easily see that for South African languages, Afrikaans has 28 NLP resources, Swati has just 8 ….or that the Gbe cluster languages of Benin have far fewer NLP resources than some of the South-African languages. Such insight can lead to better allocation of funds, efforts, etc towards bringing the more underresearched languages forward in NLP – thereby fostering the equal progress of African languages.
Check out our website for many more updates coming up soon: https://lanfrica.com/about and follow us on LinkedIn Lanfrica and on Twitter “@lanfrica”
