# The African Stopwords project: curating stopwords for African languages

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.12155 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12155/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [NaijaSenti: A Nigerian Twitter Sentiment Corpus for Multilingual Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08277/) (2022)
- [KINNEWS and KIRNEWS: Benchmarking Cross-Lingual Text Classification for Kinyarwanda and Kirundi](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12174/) (2020)
- [Stopwords in Technical Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02633/) (2020)
- [hauWE: Hausa Words Embedding for Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10708/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Text Categorization Can Enhance Domain-Agnostic Stopword Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13398/) (2024)
- [A Case Against Implicit Standards: Homophone Normalization in Machine Translation for Languages that use the Ge'ez Script](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15142/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Machine Translation Datasets for Low-Web Data Languages: A Gendered Lens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03880/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Stopwords are fundamental in Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for information retrieval. One of the common tasks in preprocessing of text data is the removal of stopwords. Currently, while high-resource languages like English benefit from the availability of several stopwords, low-resource languages, such as those found in the African continent, have none that are standardized and available for use in NLP packages. Stopwords in the context of African languages are understudied and can reveal information about the crossover between languages. The textitAfrican Stopwords project aims to study and curate stopwords for African languages. In this paper, we present our current progress on ten African languages as well as future plans for the project.