#africannlp — Public Fediverse posts

Masakhane African Languages Hub launched new call to address the underrepresentation of African languages in AI. Its about funding, visibility, and institutional support. Non-profits, social enterprises, tech innovators & research institutions based in or have a presence in Africa can apply. Main themes: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR); Benchmarking "In the Wild"; and Culturally Relevant Multimodal Datasets. Deadline: Jan 25 #AfricanNLP #MasakhaneHub #InclusiveAI https://www.masakhane.io/masakhane-african-languages-hub/grants

InkubaLM: A small language model for low-resource African languages s #InkubaLM @LelapaAI https://medium.com/@lelapa_ai/inkubalm-a-small-language-model-for-low-resource-african-languages-dc9793842dec #AfricanLLM #AfricanNLP

Local AI model is melting pot for African languages s #InkubaLM @LelapaAI https://www.itweb.co.za/article/local-ai-model-is-melting-pot-for-african-languages/j5alr7QABQo7pYQk #AfricanLLM #AfricanNLP

Supremely honoured to be featured by my PhD Alma Mater @RutgersU -> Ways Rutgers Is Shaping the AI Revolution https://www.rutgers.edu/news/ways-rutgers-shaping-ai-revolution #AfricanMachineLearning #AfricanNLP

Two data scientist positions in Berlin!

Come and work at the Robert Koch Institute in collaboration with the World Health Organization Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence. The project aims at improving the relevance of online media monitoring for public health intelligence through NLP and MLOps. 1/2

#jobs #AfricanMachineLearning #AfricanNLP #AIForGood #DataScience #Engineering #MachineLearning #NLP #OpenSource #OSS #Programming #PyLadies #Python #RLadies #RSE #RStats #WomenInSTEM

Tech jobs at the World Health Organization in Berlin, Germany. See thread above. 6/6

#jobs #GetFediHired #AfricanMachineLearning #AfricanNLP #AIForGood #DataScience #Engineering #MachineLearning #NLP #OpenSource #OSS #Programming #PyLadies #Python #RLadies #RSE #RStats #WomenInSTEM

After many years as organiser for #TEDxRutgers, finally a speaker for @TEDxPretoria

Let's go!!!!

#AfricanNLP
#AfricanMachineLearning

A great day for Grassroots AI on the African continent. @[email protected] wins the 2023 Ars Electronica Award for Digital Humanity https://calls.ars.electronica.art/2023/prix/winners/10147/

@[email protected] at @[email protected] is proud to be a partner to this initiative.

#AfricanMachineLearning
#AfricanNLP
#NLProc

Some of the posters at the #AfricaNLP workshop at #ICLR2023

#AfricanMachineLearning
#AfricanNLP

Our poster at the AfricaNLP workshop at #ICLR2023. Rozina Myoya, from our lab @DSFSI_Research , will be at the poster session.

#AfricanNLP
28/n

AI tools open up a world of African languages - African Business https://african.business/2023/03/technology-information/ai-tools-open-up-a-world-of-african-languages #WhyWeFight #NLProc #AfricanNLP #AfricanMachineLearning

First spinoff of the below work is now available, focus on Tshivenda NER.

MphayaNER: Named Entity Recognition for Tshivenda <> https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03952

A collaboration to be presented at AfricaNLP workshop at @iclr_conf 2023.

@rendx @DSFSI_Research #AfricanNLP
---
RT @vukosi
Preprint is out: "Preparing the Vuk’uzenzele and ZA-gov-multilingual South African
multilingual corpora"

New parallel aligned datasets

Vuk'uzenzele -> htt…
https://twitter.com/vukosi/status/1633368248015020033

The above work by Ishe and Richard led to these outputs

---
RT @vukosi
Preprint is out: "Preparing the Vuk’uzenzele and ZA-gov-multilingual South African
multilingual corpora"

New parallel aligned datasets

Vuk'uzenzele -> https://github.com/dsfsi/vukuzenzele-nlp
ZA-gov -> https://github.com/dsfsi/gov-za-multilingual

Thanks to collaborators @DSFSI_Research @LelapaAI
#AfricanNLP
https://twitter.com/vukosi/status/1633368248015020033

In Our second post Summer Internship blog post. Richard Lastrucci and Isheanesu Dzingirai detail their @DSFSI_Research Summer Research Experience <> From Data Engineering to Natural Language Corpora https://dsfsi.github.io/blog/Richard-Ishe-internship/
#NVIDIAGrant #AfricanNLP
@NVIDIAAIDev @UPTuks
@TensorFlow

Thrilled to share: I am part of the 2023 cohort of Young Global Leaders. Eager to collaborate with & gain insights from fellow members of the community, as well and advocate for the advancement of #AfricanMachineLearning & #AfricanNLP
#YGL23
@UPTuks @LelapaAI
@DSFSI_Research
---
RT @YGLvoices
We are delighted to unveil the #YGL Class of 2023. From courageous journalists to savvy entrepreneurs, this year's class is packed with brilli…
https://twitter.com/YGLvoices/status/1635552264977801217

We will soon be announcing an application process to fund up to 20 interdisciplinary scholars, with special focus on early career and emerging scholars, to join us at the University of Pretoria in July 2024.

#AfricanNLP #AfricanMachineLearning #GenerativeAI

Preprint is out: "Preparing the Vuk’uzenzele and ZA-gov-multilingual South African
multilingual corpora"

New parallel aligned datasets

Vuk'uzenzele -> https://github.com/dsfsi/vukuzenzele-nlp
ZA-gov -> https://github.com/dsfsi/gov-za-multilingual

Thanks to collaborators @DSFSI_Research @LelapaAI
#AfricanNLP

Our first post Summer Internship blog post. Rozina Myoya & Fiskani Banda detail their @DSFSI_Research Summer Research Experience <> Fine-tuning Multilingual Pre-trained African Language Models https://dsfsi.github.io/blog/Fiskani-Rozina-internship/
#NVIDIAGrant #AfricanNLP
@NVIDIAAIDev @UPTuks
@TensorFlow

Support @MasakhaneNLP financially through - Open Collective. Donate, Support! #AfricanMachineLearning #AfricanNlp https://opencollective.com/masakhane#category-CONNECT

#AfricanNLP
---
RT @Orange_SV
Congratulations to the first-place Machine Translation winners: the Alpha Team! We are thrilled to have collaborated with participants worldwide to help create language models that will benefit Bambara speakers. #Bambara #MachineTranslation #OrangeAfrica #NLP
https://twitter.com/Orange_SV/status/1627815458354126855

CEO @tamati_biskit and COO @alienelf of @LelapaAI on @SABCNews Morning Live.

LelapaAI launches app to enrich under-represented African languages: Pelonomi Moiloa & Jade Abbott - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIpzCGv3dr0

Find out more https://lelapa.ai/

##AfricanNLP
#AfricanMachineLearning

Comparing Africa-centric Models to OpenAI's GPT3.5 - Lelapa https://lelapa.ai/comparing-africa-centric-models-to-openais-gpt3-5-2/

#LLM #LanguageModels #AfricanMachineLearning #AfricanNLP

Gave a Keynote talk at @DeepIndabaX_ZA (hosted @UPTuks) on "#AfricanML: Where to next?".
Touch on
* Work at #AfricanNLP @DSFSI_Research
* Community matters in building #AfricanMachineLearning
* What to do next

Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/10LiryOO1znvchiJ3t6oEKpUnqIBWRaiE2ClabNh4EH0/edit?usp=sharing
Recording available later.

Congratulations to Nicolle Garber for winning one of the best paper awards at the 2022 Pan-African Artificial Intelligence and Smart Systems Conference - https://paaiss.com

The paper: "Conversational Pattern Mining using Motif Detection" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.06846

Well deserved by Nicolle. This was a very interesting and tough project she worked on as part of her Masters in Big Data Science University of Pretoria

#datascience #AfricaNLP #AfricanNLP #AfricanMachineLearning

SA’s indigenous languages must all be fully developed and featured in digital resources – a UP professor says | Universities South Africa https://www.usaf.ac.za/sas-indigenous-languages-must-all-be-fully-developed-and-featured-in-digital-resources-a-up-professor-says/

#AfricanMachineLearning #AfricanNLP
#NLProc

A memorable #TBT Professor Vukosi Marivate - Riendzo ri lehile: Tackling Natural Language Processing for African languages to make better sense of our world”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2GCuzFu43c

Thank you to @DSFSI_Research @MasakhaneNLP @DeepIndaba
#AfricanMachineLearning #AfricanNLP
#NLProc

*A Right to Research in Africa?*
A Week of Debates on Copyright and Access to Knowledge in Pretoria and Cape Town, South Africa from 23 - 27 January 2023

Register at http://recreatesa.live/R2R by 10 December 2022. No registration fee!

A collaborative conference
#AfricanNLP #NLProc

DSFSI participated in the 2022 UP School of Information Technology Research Colloquium. Also with a bunch of winners. Find out a little bit more about the event and the work we presented https://dsfsi.github.io/blog/sit-workshop/ #NLProc #AfricanMachineLearbing #AfricanNLP

On #FTX, just imagine now many of the worlds wickedest problems could have had teams funded or dedicated to them. Heck thinking what a fraction of that money could have done for #AfricanMachineLearning and #AfricanNLP? Anyway, we build.

Do it again😃.

I post, therefore I am..

I am Vukosi Marivate, Chair of #DataScience at University of Pretoria, South Africa. Hold PhD CS from Rutgers University, BSC & MSc EE from Wits University.

Work to understand the world through Data & build AI models for African Languages. PI for Data Science for Social Impact Research Group https://dsfsi.github.io

Changing the world at the Deep Learning Indaba and MasakhaneNLP

#Introduction #BlackMastodon #AfricanNLP #AfricanMachineLearning