Bridging Linguistic Frontiers: Machine Learning & NLP Innovations Empowering African Languages: Challenges, Progress, and Promising Futures

Whether expressed written, spoken, or signed, language is crucial for human communication and ensures understanding between people across regions. With the growing awareness and effort to include more low-resourced languages in NLP research, African languages have recently been a major subject of research in natural language processing. Accounting for more than 31% of living spoken languages, African languages are morphologically, culturally rich, diverse, and low-resourced. Covering a range of topics from (multilingual) machine translation, speech recognition, language modeling, named entity recognition, part-of-speech to datasets, and Lanfrica; in this presentation, I will share my journey into AfricaNLP research, challenges faced, progresses made, and future insights.