Announcements
Lanfrica and AfricArXiv Announce Strategic Partnership
of African language resources in Africa including initiatives related to natural language processing and indigenous language dissemination.
of African language resources in Africa including initiatives related to natural language processing and indigenous language dissemination.
AfricArXiv is committed to increasing access and visibility to African research through our open access portal. With our no-cost publishing for researchers, we are confident that African research will be more visible and build an active and accessible community of researchers to strengthen their research knowledge collaboratively.
There are several initiatives to foster African languages in schools and also universities such as African languages studies, natural language processing, and translations among others. Here is Chido Dzinotyiwei who is making it easier to learn indigenous African languages through her initiative, Vambo academy. Chido is a Master of Commerce student at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business (UCT GSB).
Decolonise Science will employ translators to work on papers from AfricArXiv for which the first author is African, says principal investigator Jade Abbott, a machine-learning specialist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Words that do not have an equivalent in the target language will be flagged so that terminology specialists and science communicators can develop new terms. “It is not like translating a book, where the words might exist,” Abbott says. “This is a terminology-creating exercise.”
The team at AfricArXiv is proud to announce that we are partnering with Masakhane to build a multilingual parallel corpus of African research from translations of research manuscripts submitted to AfricArXiv. Of the articles submitted, the teams at Masakhane and AfricArXiv will select up to 180 in total for translation.
“With the advancement of Natural Language Processing (NLP), it should be fairly easy for non-Indonesian [or African] speakers to understand articles written in Indonesian [or African local dialects]. Hence the burden to immediately use English as the main language of science could be lowered.”
Collecting resources from and for all levels of African societies to coordinate COVID19-responses by African organizations and influencers Thousands of individuals and hundreds of grassroots and international organisations, CBOs, NPOs, governmental and industrial are working hard to mitigate the effects of the pandemic on the African continent. We are not Read more…