mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Masakhane -- Machine Translation For Africa

arXiv 2003.11529 ↗First posted 13 Mar 2020cs.CLcited by 48

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Abstract (arXiv)

Africa has over 2000 languages. Despite this, African languages account for a small portion of available resources and publications in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This is due to multiple factors, including: a lack of focus from government and funding, discoverability, a lack of community, sheer language complexity, difficulty in reproducing papers and no benchmarks to compare techniques. To begin to address the identified problems, MASAKHANE, an open-source, continent-wide, distributed, online research effort for machine translation for African languages, was founded. In this paper, we discuss our methodology for building the community and spurring research from the African continent, as well as outline the success of the community in terms of addressing the identified problems affecting African NLP.

Key facts. Cited by 48 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 13 Mar 2020.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 12; 2022: 8; 2023: 3; 2024: 12; 2025: 5; 2026: 8.

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  1. 2024Aya Model: An Instruction Finetuned Open-Access Multilingual Language Modelcited by 292
  2. 2021Survey of Low-Resource Machine Translationcited by 92
  3. 2022POTATO: The Portable Text Annotation Toolcited by 64
  4. 2022Data Governance in the Age of Large-Scale Data-Driven Language Technologycited by 32
  5. 2024Opportunities and Challenges of Large Language Models for Low-Resource Languages in Humanities Researchcited by 26
  6. 2021AfroMT: Pretraining Strategies and Reproducible Benchmarks for Translation of 8 African Languagescited by 24
  7. 2023A Material Lens on Coloniality in NLPcited by 19
  8. 2021AI4D -- African Language Programcited by 18
  9. 2024InkubaLM: A small language model for low-resource African languagescited by 18
  10. 2022Toward More Meaningful Resources for Lower-resourced Languagescited by 14
  11. 2022KenSwQuAD -- A Question Answering Dataset for Swahili Low Resource Languagecited by 12
  12. 2022MMTAfrica: Multilingual Machine Translation for African Languagescited by 11
36 more
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  2. 2022Kencorpus: A Kenyan Language Corpus of Swahili, Dholuo and Luhya for Natural Language Processing Taskscited by 9
  3. 2021Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation for Southern African Languagescited by 7
  4. 2021Multilingual transfer of acoustic word embeddings improves when training on languages related to the target zero-resource languagecited by 7
  5. 2023Neural Machine Translation for the Indigenous Languages of the Americas: An Introductioncited by 7
  6. 2024Socially Responsible Data for Large Multilingual Language Modelscited by 7
  7. 2025The NaijaVoices Dataset: Cultivating Large-Scale, High-Quality, Culturally-Rich Speech Data for African Languagescited by 7
  8. 2021The first large scale collection of diverse Hausa language datasetscited by 6
  9. 2021Crowdsourced Phrase-Based Tokenization for Low-Resourced Neural Machine Translation: The Case of Fon Languagecited by 6
  10. 2023Evaluating Self-Supervised Speech Representations for Indigenous American Languagescited by 6
  11. 2024Standard Language Ideology in AI-Generated Languagecited by 5
  12. 2021Domain-specific MT for Low-resource Languages: The case of Bambara-Frenchcited by 4
  13. 2024Missing Melodies: AI Music Generation and its "Nearly" Complete Omission of the Global Southcited by 3
  14. 2026GhanaNLP Parallel Corpora: Comprehensive Multilingual Resources for Low-Resource Ghanaian Languagescited by 3
  15. 2022NusaCrowd: A Call for Open and Reproducible NLP Research in Indonesian Languagescited by 2
  16. 2025How much speech data is necessary for ASR in African languages? An evaluation of data scaling in Kinyarwanda and Kikuyucited by 2
  17. 2021Contextual Text Embeddings for Twicited by 1
  18. 2021AfriKI: Machine-in-the-Loop Afrikaans Poetry Generationcited by 1
  19. 2022Resolving the Human Subjects Status of Machine Learning's Crowdworkerscited by 1
  20. 2024Text Categorization Can Enhance Domain-Agnostic Stopword Extractioncited by 1
  21. 2024Curated Datasets and Neural Models for Machine Translation of Informal Registers between Mayan and Spanish Vernacularscited by 1
  22. 2024A Perspective on Literary Metaphor in the Context of Generative AIcited by 1
  23. 2021Graph Convolutional Network for Swahili News Classificationcited by 0
  24. 2021Ensuring the Inclusive Use of Natural Language Processing in the Global Response to COVID-19cited by 0
  25. 2024Leveraging AI for Climate Resilience in Africa: Challenges, Opportunities, and the Need for Collaborationcited by 0
  26. 2024Language verY Rare for Allcited by 0
  27. 2025Building a Functional Machine Translation Corpus for Kpellecited by 0
  28. 2025The African Languages Lab: A Collaborative Approach to Advancing Low-Resource African NLPcited by 0
  29. 2025Sunflower: A New Approach To Expanding Coverage of African Languages in Large Language Modelscited by 0
  30. 2026An Ubuntu-Guided Large Language Model Framework for Cognitive Behavioral Mental Health Dialoguecited by 0
  31. 2026The Thiomi Dataset: A Large-Scale Multimodal Corpus for Low-Resource African Languagescited by 0
  32. 2026Mining Large Language Models for Low-Resource Language Data: Comparing Elicitation Strategies for Hausa and Fongbecited by 0
  33. 2026A Survey of Text and Speech Resources for Hausa and Fongbe: Availability, Quality, and Gaps for NLP Developmentcited by 0
  34. 2026Toward Responsible and Epistemically Grounded Multilingual LLMs for Computational Social Science and Humanitiescited by 0
  35. 2026Evaluating the Effect of Linguistic Relatedness on Cross-Lingual Transfer in Large Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognitioncited by 0
  36. 2026Wazobia Eval: A Benchmark for Nigerian Pidgin Emotion Understanding, Sarcasm Detection, and Cultural Reasoningcited by 0