4th Workshop on African Natural Language Processing (AfricaNLP 2023)

Over 1 billion people live in Africa, and its residents speak more than 2,000 languages. But those languages are among the least represented in NLP research, and work on African languages is often sidelined at major venues. Over the past few years, a vibrant, collaborative community of researchers has formed around a sustained focus on NLP for the benefit of the African continent: national, regional, continental, and even global collaborative efforts focused on African languages, African corpora, and tasks with importance in the African context. The AfricaNLP workshops have been a central venue in organizing, sustaining, and growing this focus, and we propose to continue this tradition with an AfricaNLP 2023 workshop in Kigali. The wave of large language models built in 2022 through collaborative networks and large investments in compute have inspired the theme for the 2023 workshop: “African NLP in the Era of Large Language Models.” We plan to invite a variety of speakers from industry, research networks and academia to get their perspectives on the development of large language models and how African languages have and have not been represented in this work, and we will provide a venue to discuss the benefits and potential harms of these models on the speakers of African languages and African researchers.