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 trai...