Announcing Awards for African Language Datasets — 2021 NLP Awardees

Today, we are delighted to announce awards to 10 teams to create or expand machine learning datasets for low-resourced African languages. These projects feature languages across the continent of Africa and will enable a range of use cases, from providing citizens’ access to news and information in their native languages, to developing models for the … Continued

Sharing New Lacuna-Funded Text and Speech Data Resources for Selected Languages in Kenya

We are excited to share recently published Lacuna-funded datasets in language! The KenCorpus team, a collaborative of researchers founded by Maseno University, the University of Nairobi, and Africa Nazarene University, have developed rich textual and speech data resources for selected languages spoken in Kenya. These datasets will foster equal opportunities, inclusivity, participation in decision-making, and … Continued

Announcing Our Second Round of Funding for Datasets for Low Resource Languages

We are proud to share a selection of supported projects from our second cohort, whose ten teams will create openly accessible text and speech datasets that will fuel natural language processing (NLP) technologies in 29 languages in Eastern, Western, and Southern Africa. The training datasets produced will have significant downstream impacts on education, financial inclusion, … Continued