NLP in Africa: One Reason why I'm Learning Machine Learning


Natural language processing (or NLP) is a branch of machine learning that deals with the languages spoken by humans. This branch includes things like automatic translation, text and speech generation amongst other things.

The thing about most of the current NLP systems is that they require humongous amounts of sample text, speech and/or translations and other samples of the languages in focus to be able to be trained to perform these tasks of translation, generation etc

This need for large sample data is the biggest challenge for many African languages because a majority of these languages have very limited amounts of such samples - too little to successfully train an NLP system.

Many of these so called "low-resource" languages both in Africa and other parts of the world have been virtually overshadowed by the more popular languages like English, French, German, Spanish, Mandarin etc which have massive amounts of sample language data already available for use in training these NLP systems.

Although there is ongoing research on ways of training NLP systems using much less sample data, progress is still rather slow and there is still a long way to go.

Why Bother About these Low - Resource languages?

There are many advantages of developing automatic translation and generation systems for low-resource languages especially when viewed from the standpoint of social development and inclusiveness for minorities and underdeveloped or marginalized populations.

Imagine a system that can automatically translate health advice into all the African languages for the creation of educational content in these languages.

At this time, most of such advice are produced in the continent's most popular languages to the exclusion of most of the other low-resource languages, thereby inadvertently excluding large chunks of the population who speak a different language.

This is one of the main reasons why I am very much interested in mastering machine learning and NLP in particular: so that I can contribute to the development of NLP models and systems for low resource African languages starting with those in my country Nigeria then moving to the continent's other languages and hopefully eventually going global.

Wish me luck!

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