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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.08351 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08351/

## 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.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [AfriSenti: A Twitter Sentiment Analysis Benchmark for African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08956/) (2023)
- [SemEval-2023 Task 12: Sentiment Analysis for African Languages (AfriSenti-SemEval)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06845/) (2023)
- [SERENGETI: Massively Multilingual Language Models for Africa](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10785/) (2022)
- [AfroLID: A Neural Language Identification Tool for African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11744/) (2022)
- [GlotLID: Language Identification for Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16248/) (2023)
- [Cheetah: Natural Language Generation for 517 African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01053/) (2024)
- [NollySenti: Leveraging Transfer Learning and Machine Translation for Nigerian Movie Sentiment Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10971/) (2023)
- [Voices Unheard: NLP Resources and Models for Yor`ub'a Regional Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19564/) (2024)
- [TaTa: A Multilingual Table-to-Text Dataset for African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00142/) (2022)
- [Where Are We? Evaluating LLM Performance on African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19582/) (2025)
- [Toucan: Many-to-Many Translation for 150 African Language Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04796/) (2024)
- [First Attempt at Building Parallel Corpora for Machine Translation of Northeast India's Very Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04764/) (2023)
- [Kallaama: A Transcribed Speech Dataset about Agriculture in the Three Most Widely Spoken Languages in Senegal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01991/) (2024)
- [State of NLP in Kenya: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09948/) (2024)
- [Empowering Cross-lingual Behavioral Testing of NLP Models with Typological Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05454/) (2023)
- [Fumbling in Babel: An Investigation into ChatGPT's Language Identification Ability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09696/) (2023)
- [Evaluation of Geographical Distortions in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17401/) (2024)
- [Bhaasha, Bhasa, Zaban: A Survey for Low-Resourced Languages in South Asia -- Current Stage and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11570/) (2025)
- [Low-Resourced Machine Translation for Senegalese Wolof Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00606/) (2023)
- [A Systematic Review of NLP for Ghanaian Languages: Datasets, Models, and a Research Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06818/) (2024)
- [Breaking Physical and Linguistic Borders: Multilingual Federated Prompt Tuning for Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03003/) (2025)
- [Building Better: Avoiding Pitfalls in Developing Language Resources when Data is Scarce](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12691/) (2024)
- [Voice of a Continent: Mapping Africa's Speech Technology Frontier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18436/) (2025)
- [Invisible Languages of the LLM Universe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11557/) (2025)
- [GhanaNLP Parallel Corpora: Comprehensive Multilingual Resources for Low-Resource Ghanaian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13793/) (2026)
- [IndicSafe: A Benchmark for Evaluating Multilingual LLM Safety in South Asia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17915/) (2026)
- [Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Phrase Break Prediction with Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02579/) (2023)
- [RideKE: Leveraging Low-Resource, User-Generated Twitter Content for Sentiment and Emotion Detection in Kenyan Code-Switched Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06180/) (2025)
- [Afri-MCQA: Multimodal Cultural Question Answering for African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05699/) (2026)
- [EthioMT: Parallel Corpus for Low-resource Ethiopian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19365/) (2024)

## 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.