Lanfrica Language Highlight is about creating awareness on the not-so-popular African languages. While there are admirable efforts towards representing African languages in technology, these efforts are unequal: with some African languages receiving a lot of attention – like Swahili (swh), and Yoruba (yor) – while others have far less. See for yourself in the image below.
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The image above shows the number of records currently (7th April, 2022) linked in Lanfrica – which includes research papers, datasets, models, media, etc. – for all the African languages. While we still have more curating to do, one can immediately see the uneven spread of attention given to African languages.
In Lanfrica Language Highlight, we concentrate on the languages with low attention (count between 0 and 5). For these languages, we conduct a targeted effort to find existing records on the web. We find major people/organizations working on that language, link their resources, interview them (if possible) and release a blog about our efforts. In this way, we hope to accomplish two goals:
- Link the available resources for that language on Lanfrica in order to improve the visibility.
- Create awareness on that language, thereby inspiring the research community to work more on the African language.
To stay updated on the language highlights we release: