millicentochieng/Swahili-NLP-Landscape

# Natural Language Processing (NLP) Research on Swahili Language **Swahili**, also **Kiswahili**, is a Bantu language and the native language of the Swahili people. It is spoken by 120 – 150 million people across East and Southern Africa. Originates from Bantu languages of the coast of East Africa (Pokomo, Taita and Mijikenda languages etc.). Opinions vary, however, about 20% of the Swahili vocabulary is derived from loan words. The vast majority Arabic, but also other contributing languages, including Persian, Hindustani, Portuguese, German & Malay. It is an official language in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda & Rwanda and is recognized as a minority language in DRC, Burundi & Mozambique. This work is not a masterpiece however, it entails related works revolving around NLP research on Swahili language including; NLP tasks on Swahili Language, available datasets on Swahili Language and NLP Models trained on Swahili language. # i) NLP Tasks on Swahili Language ## Parts-of-speech tagging (POST) **Papers** [[Paper]](dl.acm.org) Shikali, et al. (2021) _Learning Syllables Using Conv-LSTM Model for Swahili Word Representation and Part-of-speech Tagging, ACM._ [[Paper]](biblio.ugent.be) Guy, et al. (2012) _Resource-Light Bantu Part-of-Speech Tagging, Google Scholar._ **Available datasets** [[Dataset]](kielipankki.fi) _Helsinki Corpus of Swahili 2.0._ ## Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) **Papers** [[Paper]](helda.helsinki.fi) Wanjiku NG’ANG’A (2005) _Word Sense Disambiguation of Swahili: Extending Swahili Language Technology with Machine Learning, Google Scholar._ ## Named Entity Recognition (NER) **Papers** [[Paper]](MasakhaNER: Named Entity Re…) Adelani, et al. (2021) _MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African Languages._ **Available datasets** [[Dataset]](github.com …