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

Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics Volume 1: Long Papers, pages 3814 - 3841 May 22-27, 2022 c⃝2022 Association for Computational Linguistics Towards Afrocentric NLP for African Languages: Where We Are and Where We Can Go Ife Adebara Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing Group The University of British Columbia ife.adebara@ubc.ca Muhammad Abdul-Mageed Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing Group The University of British Columbia muhammad.mageed@ubc.ca Abstract Aligning with ACL 2022 special Theme on “Language Diversity: from Low Re- source to Endangered Languages", we dis- cuss the major linguistic and sociopolitical challenges facing development of NLP technologies for African languages. Situ- ating African languages in a typological framework, we discuss how the particu- lars of these languages can be harnessed. To facilitate future research, we also high- light current efforts, communities, venues, datasets, and tools. Our main objective is to motivate and advocate for an Afro- centric approach to technology develop- ment. With this in mind, we recommend what technologies to build and how to build, evaluate, and deploy them based on the needs of local African communities. 1 Introduction Language is the foundation on which commu- nication rests, allowing us to share ideas and interact with one another. Cultures are built on this foundation. We cannot understand, nurture, or help a culture thrive without understanding and nurturing the language carrying it. Lan- guage, in turn, is incubated and evolved by culture (Fourie, 1995). Each culture is thus naturally best expressed using the language in which it evolved, which encodes knowledge about people, their traditions, wisdom, envir- onment, and how they interact with the sum of the concepts that belong to their own cul- ture. Technology is an element of culture that arguably both shapes and is shaped by it. Tech- nology interacts in complex ways with other elements of culture such as gender, race, and class. Natural language processing (NLP) tech- Figure 1: African languages discussed in this paper. A high quality version is in Figure F.1 (Appendix). nologies are no exception, and play an increas- ingly important role in today’s world. Mod- ern NLP technologies, however, have primar- ily been developed in Western societies. As such, they often function within contexts of values, norms, and beliefs that reflect these so- cieties and serve their needs. On the other hand, the very methods employed to develop most of these technologies and the knowledge on which they rest also derive from the same Western- Centric approaches. This poses challenges to the extension and use of these technologies in communities with different social fabrics that speak different languages. The scale of this problem is huge, because the majority of the world’s 7000+ living languages (Eberhard et al., 2021) are not NLP-supported. Apart from per- haps two dozens of popular languages, most languages of the world are under-resourced, in- digenous, and/or endangered. Most African languages fall within this category and are the focus of this paper (Figure 1). Our goal is to discuss the major linguistic …

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