Aligning with ACL 2022 special Theme
on “Language Diversity: from Low Resource to Endangered Languages", we discuss the major linguistic and sociopolitical
challenges facing development of NLP
technologies for African languages. Situating African languages in a typological
framework, we discuss how the particulars of these languages can be harnessed.
To facilitate future research, we also highlight current efforts, communities, venues,
datasets, and tools. Our main objective
is to motivate and advocate for an Afrocentric approach to technology development. With this in mind, we recommend
what technologies to build and how to
build, evaluate, and deploy them based on
the needs of local African communities.