mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Cheetah: Natural Language Generation for 517 African Languages

arXiv 2401.01053 ↗First posted 2 Jan 2024cs.CLcited by 15

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Abstract (arXiv)

Low-resource African languages pose unique challenges for natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including natural language generation (NLG). In this paper, we develop Cheetah, a massively multilingual NLG language model for African languages. Cheetah supports 517 African languages and language varieties, allowing us to address the scarcity of NLG resources and provide a solution to foster linguistic diversity. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Cheetah through comprehensive evaluations across six generation downstream tasks. In five of the six tasks, Cheetah significantly outperforms other models, showcasing its remarkable performance for generating coherent and contextually appropriate text in a wide range of African languages. We additionally conduct a detailed human evaluation to delve deeper into the linguistic capabilities of Cheetah. The introduction of Cheetah has far-reaching benefits for linguistic diversity. By leveraging pretrained models and adapting them to specific languages, our approach facilitates the development of practical NLG applications for African communities. The findings of this study contribute to advancing NLP research in low-resource settings, enabling greater accessibility and inclusion for African languages in a rapidly expanding digital landscape. We publicly release our models for research.

Key facts. Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 34 of its 61 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Jan 2024.

Builds on

34 of 61 references.

References · 34

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 2; 2025: 11; 2026: 2.

15 papers.

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  1. 2025Charting the Landscape of African NLP: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Aheadcited by 16
  2. 2025AFRIDOC-MT: Document-level MT Corpus for African Languagescited by 11
  3. 2025Where Are We? Evaluating LLM Performance on African Languagescited by 10
  4. 2024A Systematic Review of NLP for Ghanaian Languages: Datasets, Models, and a Research Roadmapcited by 5
  5. 2025Voice of a Continent: Mapping Africa's Speech Technology Frontiercited by 4
  6. 2025Bridging Gaps in Natural Language Processing for Yor`ub'a: A Systematic Review of a Decade of Progress and Prospectscited by 2
  7. 2025LAG-MMLU: Benchmarking Frontier LLM Understanding in Latvian and Giriamacited by 2
  8. 2025PrahokBART: A Pre-trained Sequence-to-Sequence Model for Khmer Natural Language Generationcited by 1
  9. 2024Yankari: A Monolingual Yoruba Datasetcited by 0
  10. 2025Automatic Correction of Writing Anomalies in Hausa Textscited by 0
  11. 2025The African Languages Lab: A Collaborative Approach to Advancing Low-Resource African NLPcited by 0
  12. 2025Pretraining Strategies using Monolingual and Parallel Data for Low-Resource Machine Translationcited by 0
3 more
  1. 2025Opportunities and Challenges of Natural Language Processing for Low-Resource Senegalese Languages in Social Science Researchcited by 0
  2. 2026AfroScope: A Framework for Studying the Linguistic Landscape of Africacited by 0
  3. 2026Large Language Models for Low-Resource Languages: A Conceptual Framework for an Electronic Explanatory Dictionary of the Tajik Languagecited by 0