Workshop
5th Workshop on African Natural Language Processing (AfricaNLP 2024)
Happy Buzaaba · Bonaventure F. P. Dossou · David Adelani · Hady Elsahar · Constantine Lignos · Atnafu Lambebo Tonja · Salomey Osei · Anuoluwapo Aremu · Clemencia Siro · shamsuddeen muhammad · Tajuddeen Gwadabe · Perez Ogayo · Israel Abebe Azime · Kayode K Olaleye
Schubert 4
Sat 11 May, midnight PDT
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 2024 workshop in Vienna.Starting in 2020, the AfricaNLP workshop has become a core event for the African NLP community and has drawn global attendance and interest. Many of the participants are active in the Masakhane grassroots NLP community, allowing the community to convene, showcase and share experiences with each other. 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). Many first-time authors, through the mentorship program, 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.In the contemporary AI landscape, generative AI has rapidly expanded with significant input and innovation from the global research community. This technology enables machines to generate novel content, showcases potential across a multitude of sectors. However, underrepresentation of African languages persists within this growth. Recognizing the urgency to address this gap has inspired the theme for the 2024 workshop: Adaptation of Generative AI for African languages which aspires to congregate experts, linguists, and AI enthusiasts to delve into solutions, collaborations, and strategies to amplify the presence of African languages in generative AI models.
Schedule
Sat 12:00 a.m. - 12:05 a.m.
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Opening Remarks
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Opening Remarks
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SlidesLive Video |
Bonaventure F. P. Dossou 🔗 |
Sat 12:05 a.m. - 12:45 a.m.
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Morning Keynote: NLP Tools for low-resource African languages
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Keynote by Pelonomi Moiloa
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SlidesLive Video |
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Sat 12:45 a.m. - 1:25 a.m.
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Invited Talk: Generative Speech XTTS
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Invited Talk
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SlidesLive Video |
Josh Meyer 🔗 |
Sat 1:25 a.m. - 1:40 a.m.
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Mini Break
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Coffee Break
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Sat 1:40 a.m. - 2:10 a.m.
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Spotlight Talk
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Spotlight Talks from Authors
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SlidesLive Video |
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Sat 2:10 a.m. - 2:50 a.m.
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Invited Talk: Building a Multimodal Dataset for African languages
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Invited Talk
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SlidesLive Video |
Claytone Sikasote 🔗 |
Sat 2:50 a.m. - 3:50 a.m.
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Poster Session
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Break-out rooms (online)
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Sat 3:50 a.m. - 5:00 a.m.
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Social + Lunch Break
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Social + Lunch Break
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Sat 5:00 a.m. - 5:40 a.m.
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Afternoon Keynote: LLMs and African Languages
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Keynote by Graham Neubig
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SlidesLive Video |
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Sat 5:40 a.m. - 6:10 a.m.
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Spotlight Talk
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Spotlight Talks from Author
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SlidesLive Video |
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Sat 6:10 a.m. - 6:25 a.m.
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Mini Break
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Coffee break
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Sat 6:25 a.m. - 7:05 a.m.
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Invited Talk: Building LMs for African languages using small quality data
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Invited Talk by Akintunde Olandipo
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SlidesLive Video |
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Sat 7:05 a.m. - 7:45 a.m.
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Invited Talk: Scaling multilingual LMs to 500 African languages
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Invited Talk: Ife Adebara
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SlidesLive Video |
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Sat 7:45 a.m. - 8:00 a.m.
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Closing Remarks and Best paper awards
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Closing Remarks and Best paper awards
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SlidesLive Video |
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