AfricaNLP - Unlocking Local Languages

The rise in ML community efforts on the African continent has led to a growing interest in Natural Language Processing, particularly for African languages which are typically low resource languages. This interest is manifesting in the form of national, regional, continental and even global collaborative efforts to build corpora, as well as the application of the aggregated corpora to various NLP tasks.

This workshop therefore has several aims;
1) to showcase this work being done by the African NLP community and provide a platform to share this expertise with a global audience interested in NLP techniques for low resource languages
2) to provide a platform for the groups involved with the various projects to meet, interact, share and forge closer collaboration
3) to provide a platform for junior researchers to present papers, solutions, and begin interacting with the wider NLP community
4) to present an opportunity for more experienced researchers to further publicize their work and inspire younger researchers through keynotes and invited talks