The Lacuna Fund will soon be putting out a 2nd call for African NLP datasets. Masakhane and the Lacuna Fund are jointly opening a position for a Resident who will work to build avenues and resources for greater multi-disciplinary collaboration with linguists. This work is in a bid to open up further possibilities in language technologies, primarily in the creation of datasets, and build relationships that can support applications to the 2nd Lacuna funding call for language datasets.

Through some interaction with several linguists who are already part of Masakhane, we have learnt that:

1. While both technologists and linguists have an innate sense that they can be of use to each other, there is room to further explore what resources can be created at the intersection of the two disciplines that would be of use in building language technology

2. Linguists, through their education and academic careers, often develop language resources as part of language documentation efforts. These resources are however often not in a format that is easily accessible for Machine Learning or entirely not online. Creating frameworks for collaboration between the 2 disciplines with the expected outcome of digitisation of these resources would be useful. 

This will be a three month role. 

Given the majority representation of NLP researchers within Masakhane, the ideal candidate for this role is a linguist who has access to networks and communities of linguists and has collaborated on Masakhane projects. This positions them well to access the individuals with the profiles needed to partake in the research work.

Responsibilities

• Design a plan for engagement of the linguists and NLP researcher stakeholder groups

• Define outputs/resources created (ideally resources that can encourage knowledge of the fields and encourage collaboration; eg. NLP for Linguists/Linguistics for NLP notebooks/tutorials)

• Facilitating sessions with stakeholders

• Compiling of outputs

Requirements

• Previous work experience as a linguist

• A good network of linguists and involvement with linguists communities, particularly in Africa

• Knowledge of software commonly used by linguists in language documentation and other professional duties

• Experience working with Masakhane NLP researchers

• High-level grasp of NLP research work

• Knowledge around language datasets for NLP

• Event organisation and coordination

Number of Individuals: 1

Time commitment: 10 to 15 hours a week (will vary)

Remuneration: US$ 1000 per month

Duration: 3 months (October to January with a break for the holidays)

Location: Remote

How to apply: Email your CV and 500 words motivation, highlighting relevant experience, to tgwadabe@yahoo.com

Application Deadline: 22 September 2021

The Lacuna Fund will soon be putting out a 2nd call for African NLP datasets. Masakhane and the Lacuna Fund are jointly opening a position to complement the 2nd call for proposals for AfricaNLP datasets to enable more inclusion, facilitate more collaborations and partnerships across the continent

Masakhane and Lacuna are jointly opening a Francophone Engagement Residency. Among members of our community, it is increasingly becoming apparent that, courtesy of English being the language of Science, Francophone and Lusophone African researchers and subsequently languages are being left behind. In a bid to begin closing this gap, we propose a series of activities to be led by several members of our community who belong to these underrepresented groups.

Responsibilities

As part of the Francophone Engagement Residency, you would be responsible for

• The translation of existing Masakhane resources to French. More specifically:

  • The Masakhane website

  • NLP notebooks and READMEs of projects on github

  • Talks and presentations that are central to communicating the mission of Masakhane

• Application support and mentorship for the Lacuna Fund call

  • Advocating for the inclusion of Francophone African languages in the existing Lacuna-funded Masakhane Projects(NER, MT), in addition to submissions for original works.

• Evangelism about African NLP within Francophone machine learning communities, encouraging them to apply to the Lacuna Fund for grants

Requirements

• Experience in community engagement

• 1+ years Administration experience (e.g. through AI community management or as part of a startup)

• Good networks within the African AI community, especially the Francophone community

• Fluent in French, spoken and written.

• Excellent communicator

• Existing participation in the Masakhane community

Number of Individuals: 3 

Time commitment: 10 to 15 hours a week (will vary)

Remuneration: US$ 1000 per month

Duration: 3 working months (October to mid-Jan, allowing for a break in December)

Location: Remote

How to apply: Email your CV and 500 words motivation, highlighting relevant experience, to tgwadabe@yahoo.com

Application Deadline: 22 September 2021

The Lacuna Fund is putting out a 2nd call for African NLP datasets. Masakhane and the Lacuna Fund are jointly opening a position to complement the 2nd call for proposals for AfricaNLP datasets. The Mentorship and Collaboration Resident will work with individuals and teams to grow their ideas, facilitate more collaborations and partnerships across the continent, therefore enabling inclusion and stronger applications to the 2nd Lacuna Call for Language datasets.

This would entail several sets of activities whose main purpose will be to make individuals in the ecosystem aware of each other's work, and where applicable, encourage them to collaborate ahead of the next call for funding.

Responsibilities

• Design a preliminary Expression of Interest(EoI) for individuals within the extended Masakhane network who have any ongoing work or ideas of work that could benefit from receiving funding via the Lacuna call. 

• Design a mentorship program such that each group of applicants is able to access a mentor with relevant experience 

• Organize several workshops bringing together applicants who are working in related fields. 

• Coordinating and organizing communication sessions between relevant groups. 

• Publicise several calls for  EoI, Mentorship programs, and workshops and maintain accessible information on each. 

Requirements

• High level understanding of relevant fields such as: Natural Language Processing, Linguistics, Dataset creation for Machine Learning.

• Experience with technical event organization such as workshops, hackathons, or mentorship sessions. 

• Established network and involvement in the African ML/NLP/Data science ecosystem and/or Masakhane

• Strong communication & Collaboration skills. 

Number of Individuals: 2

Time commitment: 10 to 15 hours a week (will vary)

Remuneration: US$ 1000 per month

Duration: 3 working months  (October to mid-Jan, allowing for a break in December)

Location: Remote

How to apply: Email your CV and 500 words motivation, highlighting relevant experience, to tgwadabe@yahoo.com

Application Deadline: 22 September 2021