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The Rise of AfricaNLP: A Survey of Contributions, Contributors, Community Impact, and Bibliometric Analysis

arXiv 2509.25477 ↗First posted 29 Sep 2025cs.CLcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is undergoing constant transformation, as Large Language Models (LLMs) are driving daily breakthroughs in research and practice. In this regard, tracking the progress of NLP research and automatically analyzing the contributions of research papers provides key insights into the nature of the field and the researchers. This study explores the progress of African NLP (AfricaNLP) by asking (and answering) research questions about the progress of AfricaNLP (publications, NLP topics, and NLP tasks), contributions (data, method, and task), and contributors (authors, affiliated institutions, and funding bodies). We quantitatively examine two decades (2005 - 2025) of contributions to AfricaNLP research, using a dataset of 2.2K NLP papers, 4.9K contributing authors, and 7.8K human-annotated contribution sentences (AfricaNLPContributions), along with benchmark results. Our dataset and AfricaNLP research explorer tool will provide a powerful lens for tracing AfricaNLP research trends and holds potential for generating data-driven research approaches. The resource can be found in GitHub.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 28 of its 66 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2025.

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28 of 66 references.

References · 28

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 60,361
  2. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,399
  3. 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,599
  4. 2019Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scalecited by 3,935
  5. 2024A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judgecited by 1,423
  6. 2019SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Textcited by 1,414
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  8. 2023SIB-200: A Simple, Inclusive, and Big Evaluation Dataset for Topic Classification in 200+ Languages and Dialectscited by 152
  9. 2022POTATO: The Portable Text Annotation Toolcited by 64
  10. 2022Towards Afrocentric NLP for African Languages: Where We Are and Where We Can Gocited by 47
  11. 2023AfroBench: How Good are Large Language Models on African Languages?cited by 43
  12. 2022AfroLID: A Neural Language Identification Tool for African Languagescited by 39
16 more
  1. 2020Arabic Offensive Language on Twitter: Analysis and Experimentscited by 29
  2. 2024On Behalf of the Stakeholders: Trends in NLP Model Interpretability in the Era of LLMscited by 25
  3. 2021SemEval-2021 Task 11: NLPContributionGraph -- Structuring Scholarly NLP Contributions for a Research Knowledge Graphcited by 16
  4. 2024Dallah: A Dialect-Aware Multimodal Large Language Model for Arabiccited by 16
  5. 2025Charting the Landscape of African NLP: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Aheadcited by 16
  6. 2019Interactive Refinement of Cross-Lingual Word Embeddingscited by 13
  7. 2024The Nature of NLP: Analyzing Contributions in NLP Paperscited by 12
  8. 2023Natural Language Processing in Ethiopian Languages: Current State, Challenges, and Opportunitiescited by 11
  9. 2024Krey`ol-MT: Building MT for Latin American, Caribbean and Colonial African Creole Languagescited by 10
  10. 2025The State of Large Language Models for African Languages: Progress and Challengescited by 8
  11. 2020NLPContributions: An Annotation Scheme for Machine Reading of Scholarly Contributions in Natural Language Processing Literaturecited by 7
  12. 2024State of NLP in Kenya: A Surveycited by 7
  13. 2025Automatic Speech Recognition for African Low-Resource Languages: Challenges and Future Directionscited by 6
  14. 2025Investigating the Impact of Language-Adaptive Fine-Tuning on Sentiment Analysis in Hausa Language Using AfriBERTacited by 4
  15. 2024NLU-STR at SemEval-2024 Task 1: Generative-based Augmentation and Encoder-based Scoring for Semantic Textual Relatednesscited by 3
  16. 2024Pula: Training Large Language Models for Setswanacited by 2

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