mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African Languages

arXiv 2103.11811 ↗First posted 22 Mar 2021cs.CL cs.AIcited by 155

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Abstract (arXiv)

We take a step towards addressing the under-representation of the African continent in NLP research by creating the first large publicly available high-quality dataset for named entity recognition (NER) in ten African languages, bringing together a variety of stakeholders. We detail characteristics of the languages to help researchers understand the challenges that these languages pose for NER. We analyze our datasets and conduct an extensive empirical evaluation of state-of-the-art methods across both supervised and transfer learning settings. We release the data, code, and models in order to inspire future research on African NLP.

Key facts. Cited by 155 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 27 of its 77 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Mar 2021.

Builds on

27 of 77 references.

References · 27

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  8. 2020Don't Stop Pretraining: Adapt Language Models to Domains and Taskscited by 1,548
  9. 2020XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalizationcited by 738
  10. 2016Neural Architectures for Named Entity Recognitioncited by 548
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  12. 2020MAD-X: An Adapter-Based Framework for Multi-Task Cross-Lingual Transfercited by 443
15 more
  1. 2016End-to-end Sequence Labeling via Bi-directional LSTM-CNNs-CRFcited by 341
  2. 2020LUKE: Deep Contextualized Entity Representations with Entity-aware Self-attentioncited by 326
  3. 2015Named Entity Recognition with Bidirectional LSTM-CNNscited by 201
  4. 2020Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languagescited by 159
  5. 2019CCAligned: A Massive Collection of Cross-Lingual Web-Document Pairscited by 136
  6. 2019A Survey on Recent Advances in Named Entity Recognition from Deep Learning modelscited by 117
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  8. 2020Transfer Learning and Distant Supervision for Multilingual Transformer Models: A Study on African Languagescited by 52
  9. 2019Massive vs. Curated Word Embeddings for Low-Resourced Languages. The Case of Yor`ub'a and Twicited by 33
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  11. 2020Interpretable Multi-dataset Evaluation for Named Entity Recognitioncited by 27
  12. 2017DyNet: The Dynamic Neural Network Toolkitcited by 21
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  14. 2019A Focus on Neural Machine Translation for African Languagescited by 15
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Citing papers per year: 2021: 5; 2022: 33; 2023: 45; 2024: 28; 2025: 29; 2026: 15.

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  1. 2024Aya Model: An Instruction Finetuned Open-Access Multilingual Language Modelcited by 292
  2. 2022Challenges and Strategies in Cross-Cultural NLPcited by 216
  3. 2023The BigScience ROOTS Corpus: A 1.6TB Composite Multilingual Datasetcited by 148
  4. 2021Composable Sparse Fine-Tuning for Cross-Lingual Transfercited by 144
  5. 2022A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way! Leveraging Pre-trained Models for African News Translationcited by 97
  6. 2022State-of-the-art generalisation research in NLP: A taxonomy and reviewcited by 97
  7. 2023NLPositionality: Characterizing Design Biases of Datasets and Modelscited by 91
  8. 2023XLM-V: Overcoming the Vocabulary Bottleneck in Multilingual Masked Language Modelscited by 88
  9. 2023AfriSenti: A Twitter Sentiment Analysis Benchmark for African Languagescited by 68
  10. 2023BUFFET: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Few-shot Cross-lingual Transfercited by 68
  11. 2022NusaX: Multilingual Parallel Sentiment Dataset for 10 Indonesian Local Languagescited by 67
  12. 2022NaijaSenti: A Nigerian Twitter Sentiment Corpus for Multilingual Sentiment Analysiscited by 64
38 more
  1. 2024What Matters for Model Merging at Scale?cited by 52
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  3. 2024Multilingual Large Language Model: A Survey of Resources, Taxonomy and Frontierscited by 49
  4. 2022AfroLM: A Self-Active Learning-based Multilingual Pretrained Language Model for 23 African Languagescited by 46
  5. 2022Expanding Pretrained Models to Thousands More Languages via Lexicon-based Adaptationcited by 44
  6. 2023Improving Language Plasticity via Pretraining with Active Forgettingcited by 43
  7. 2023AfroBench: How Good are Large Language Models on African Languages?cited by 43
  8. 2024IrokoBench: A New Benchmark for African Languages in the Age of Large Language Modelscited by 43
  9. 2023SemEval-2023 Task 12: Sentiment Analysis for African Languages (AfriSenti-SemEval)cited by 41
  10. 2024SEACrowd: A Multilingual Multimodal Data Hub and Benchmark Suite for Southeast Asian Languagescited by 41
  11. 2022SERENGETI: Massively Multilingual Language Models for Africacited by 40
  12. 2022MasakhaNER 2.0: Africa-centric Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognitioncited by 38
  13. 2022NusaCrowd: Open Source Initiative for Indonesian NLP Resourcescited by 38
  14. 2023XTREME-UP: A User-Centric Scarce-Data Benchmark for Under-Represented Languagescited by 34
  15. 2023When Is Multilinguality a Curse? Language Modeling for 250 High- and Low-Resource Languagescited by 32
  16. 2023MasakhaNEWS: News Topic Classification for African languagescited by 30
  17. 2022KinyaBERT: a Morphology-aware Kinyarwanda Language Modelcited by 27
  18. 2022What a Creole Wants, What a Creole Needscited by 27
  19. 2024Goldfish: Monolingual Language Models for 350 Languagescited by 27
  20. 2023Universal NER: A Gold-Standard Multilingual Named Entity Recognition Benchmarkcited by 26
  21. 2022Beyond Counting Datasets: A Survey of Multilingual Dataset Construction and Necessary Resourcescited by 25
  22. 2022GreenPLM: Cross-Lingual Transfer of Monolingual Pre-Trained Language Models at Almost No Costcited by 24
  23. 2023AfriQA: Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering for African Languagescited by 23
  24. 2023MasakhaPOS: Part-of-Speech Tagging for Typologically Diverse African Languagescited by 23
  25. 2021Dataset Geography: Mapping Language Data to Language Userscited by 22
  26. 2025Beyond English: The Impact of Prompt Translation Strategies across Languages and Tasks in Multilingual LLMscited by 22
  27. 2023InstructAlign: High-and-Low Resource Language Alignment via Continual Crosslingual Instruction Tuningcited by 21
  28. 2023A Material Lens on Coloniality in NLPcited by 19
  29. 2021On Language Models for Creolescited by 17
  30. 2023Multi3WOZ: A Multilingual, Multi-Domain, Multi-Parallel Dataset for Training and Evaluating Culturally Adapted Task-Oriented Dialog Systemscited by 16
  31. 2024EMMA-500: Enhancing Massively Multilingual Adaptation of Large Language Modelscited by 16
  32. 2022Intriguing Properties of Compression on Multilingual Modelscited by 15
  33. 2022MULTI3NLU++: A Multilingual, Multi-Intent, Multi-Domain Dataset for Natural Language Understanding in Task-Oriented Dialoguecited by 15
  34. 2023Translation and Fusion Improves Zero-shot Cross-lingual Information Extractioncited by 15
  35. 2023Cross-Lingual Transfer with Target Language-Ready Task Adapterscited by 15
  36. 2022Toward More Meaningful Resources for Lower-resourced Languagescited by 14
  37. 2022yosm: A new yoruba sentiment corpus for movie reviewscited by 14
  38. 2023NollySenti: Leveraging Transfer Learning and Machine Translation for Nigerian Movie Sentiment Classificationcited by 14

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