mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Towards Afrocentric NLP for African Languages: Where We Are and Where We Can Go

arXiv 2203.08351 ↗First posted 16 Mar 2022cs.CL cs.AIcited by 47

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Abstract (arXiv)

Aligning with ACL 2022 special Theme on "Language Diversity: from Low Resource to Endangered Languages", we discuss the major linguistic and sociopolitical challenges facing development of NLP technologies for African languages. Situating African languages in a typological framework, we discuss how the particulars of these languages can be harnessed. To facilitate future research, we also highlight current efforts, communities, venues, datasets, and tools. Our main objective is to motivate and advocate for an Afrocentric approach to technology development. With this in mind, we recommend textitwhat technologies to build and textithow to build, evaluate, and deploy them based on the needs of local African communities.

Key facts. Cited by 47 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 0 of its 1 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Mar 2022.

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2022: 3; 2023: 12; 2024: 10; 2025: 13; 2026: 9.

47 papers.

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  1. 2023AfriSenti: A Twitter Sentiment Analysis Benchmark for African Languagescited by 68
  2. 2023SemEval-2023 Task 12: Sentiment Analysis for African Languages (AfriSenti-SemEval)cited by 41
  3. 2022SERENGETI: Massively Multilingual Language Models for Africacited by 40
  4. 2022AfroLID: A Neural Language Identification Tool for African Languagescited by 39
  5. 2023GlotLID: Language Identification for Low-Resource Languagescited by 39
  6. 2024Cheetah: Natural Language Generation for 517 African Languagescited by 15
  7. 2023NollySenti: Leveraging Transfer Learning and Machine Translation for Nigerian Movie Sentiment Classificationcited by 14
  8. 2024Voices Unheard: NLP Resources and Models for Yor`ub'a Regional Dialectscited by 11
  9. 2022TaTa: A Multilingual Table-to-Text Dataset for African Languagescited by 10
  10. 2025Where Are We? Evaluating LLM Performance on African Languagescited by 10
  11. 2024Toucan: Many-to-Many Translation for 150 African Language Pairscited by 8
  12. 2023First Attempt at Building Parallel Corpora for Machine Translation of Northeast India's Very Low-Resource Languagescited by 7
35 more
  1. 2024Kallaama: A Transcribed Speech Dataset about Agriculture in the Three Most Widely Spoken Languages in Senegalcited by 7
  2. 2024State of NLP in Kenya: A Surveycited by 7
  3. 2023Empowering Cross-lingual Behavioral Testing of NLP Models with Typological Featurescited by 6
  4. 2023Fumbling in Babel: An Investigation into ChatGPT's Language Identification Abilitycited by 6
  5. 2024Evaluation of Geographical Distortions in Language Modelscited by 6
  6. 2025Bhaasha, Bhasa, Zaban: A Survey for Low-Resourced Languages in South Asia -- Current Stage and Challengescited by 6
  7. 2023Low-Resourced Machine Translation for Senegalese Wolof Languagecited by 5
  8. 2024A Systematic Review of NLP for Ghanaian Languages: Datasets, Models, and a Research Roadmapcited by 5
  9. 2025Breaking Physical and Linguistic Borders: Multilingual Federated Prompt Tuning for Low-Resource Languagescited by 5
  10. 2024Building Better: Avoiding Pitfalls in Developing Language Resources when Data is Scarcecited by 4
  11. 2025Voice of a Continent: Mapping Africa's Speech Technology Frontiercited by 4
  12. 2025Invisible Languages of the LLM Universecited by 4
  13. 2026GhanaNLP Parallel Corpora: Comprehensive Multilingual Resources for Low-Resource Ghanaian Languagescited by 3
  14. 2026IndicSafe: A Benchmark for Evaluating Multilingual LLM Safety in South Asiacited by 3
  15. 2023Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Phrase Break Prediction with Multilingual Language Modelcited by 2
  16. 2025RideKE: Leveraging Low-Resource, User-Generated Twitter Content for Sentiment and Emotion Detection in Kenyan Code-Switched Datasetcited by 2
  17. 2026Afri-MCQA: Multimodal Cultural Question Answering for African Languagescited by 2
  18. 2024EthioMT: Parallel Corpus for Low-resource Ethiopian Languagescited by 1
  19. 2024Interplay of Machine Translation, Diacritics, and Diacritizationcited by 1
  20. 2025Amplify Initiative: Building A Localized Data Platform for Globalized AIcited by 1
  21. 2025A Case Against Implicit Standards: Homophone Normalization in Machine Translation for Languages that use the Ge'ez Scriptcited by 1
  22. 2026SAFARI: A Community-Engaged Approach and Dataset of Stereotype Resources in the Sub-Saharan African Contextcited by 1
  23. 2026Going PLACES: Participatory Localized Red Teaming for Text-to-Image Safety in the Global Southcited by 1
  24. 2026AfriSUD: A Dependency Treebank Collection for Evaluating Models on African Languagescited by 1
  25. 2023UBC-DLNLP at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Impact of Transfer Learning on African Sentiment Analysiscited by 0
  26. 2023From Local to Global: Navigating Linguistic Diversity in the African Contextcited by 0
  27. 2023UCAS-IIE-NLP at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Enhancing Generalization of Multilingual BERT for Low-resource Sentiment Analysiscited by 0
  28. 2025NaijaNLP: A Survey of Nigerian Low-Resource Languagescited by 0
  29. 2025The Rise of AfricaNLP: A Survey of Contributions, Contributors, Community Impact, and Bibliometric Analysiscited by 0
  30. 2025The African Languages Lab: A Collaborative Approach to Advancing Low-Resource African NLPcited by 0
  31. 2025Sunflower: A New Approach To Expanding Coverage of African Languages in Large Language Modelscited by 0
  32. 2025Opportunities and Challenges of Natural Language Processing for Low-Resource Senegalese Languages in Social Science Researchcited by 0
  33. 2026Sample-Size Scaling of the African Languages NLI Evaluationcited by 0
  34. 2026How Many Labels Does a Language Need? Annotation Budgets and Cross-Lingual Pooling for African-Language Text Classificationcited by 0
  35. 2026Towards the Roof of the World: NLP Progress in Tibetan Languagescited by 0