This kick-off is part of a webinar series, hosted by the International Research Centre in Artificial Intelligence IRCAI[) and supported by UNESCO and Knowledge 4 All Foundation, to present the Fellowship to develop datasets and strengthen capacities and innovation potential for Low Resource African Languages project that is composed of research in natural language processing, open dataset creation and publishing, and the development of an interface between policy and technology sphere.
One of the results coming from the fellowship are 4 new projects which are supported by the Lacuna Fund, in collaboration with Canada’s International Development Research Centre, the German development agency GIZ on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), The Rockefeller Foundation and Google.org.
This webinar will look at the structure and delivery plan of the new projects that intersect with the Fellowship to develop datasets and strengthen capacities and innovation potential for Low Resource African Languages projects.
Masakhane MT: Decolonizing Scientific Writing for Africa
Masakhane NER: Named Entity Recognition & Parts of Speech datasets for African Languages
Building NLP Text and Speech Datasets for Low Resourced Languages in East Africa
Nigerian Sentiment Lexicon
The kick-off meeting will cover the following:
Formal presentation by the project leads
Formal presentation by the project officer
Review of project overview and different roles and potential outcomes
Definition of different structures and where possible identification of individual responsibilities
Presentation of available software and networks that can be exploited
Identification of areas where development is needed and which partners will be responsible for what
Scheduling of the next set of meetings, including a technical workshop later in the year (perhaps w/c July), PMC meetings, and next project meetings.