LAUNCH OF LANAFRICA - CONNECTING ALL AFRICAN LANGUAGE RESOURCES, ONE RECORD AT A TIME

LAUNCH OF LANAFRICA - CONNECTING ALL AFRICAN LANGUAGE RESOURCES, ONE RECORD AT A TIME

After winning the UNESCO #VivaTech2021 challenge, Chris Emezue and I, are happy to announce that Lanfrica is officially launched.

Lanfrica 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 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”