AfricaNLP 2022: NLP for African languages

Africa has over 2000 languages and yet is one of the least represented in NLP research. The rise in ML community efforts on the African continent has led to a vibrant NLP community. This interest is manifesting in the form of national, regional, continental and even global collaborative efforts focused on African languages, African corpora, and tasks with importance to the African context. Starting in 2020, the AfricaNLP workshop has become a core event for the African NLP community. Many of the participants are active in the Masakhane grassroots NLP community members, allowing the community to convene, showcase and share experiences with each other. Many first-time authors, through the mentorship programme, found collaborators and published their first paper. Those mentorship relationships built trust and coherence within the community that continues to this day. We aim to continue this.Large scale collaborative works have been enabled by participants who joined from the AfricaNLP workshop such as MasakhaNER (61 authors), Quality assessment of Multilingual Datasets (51 authors), Corpora Building for Twi (25 authors), NLP for Ghanaian Languages (25 Authors).This workshop follows the previous successful edition in 2020 and 2021 co-located with ICLR and EACL respectively.