Africa Computational Linguistics Summer School
Empowering native speakers and scholars of African languages to become leaders in language technology and artificial intelligence.
The recent technological developments and advancements in artificial intelligence have ignited another phase of industrial evolution. In this phase, there are different chatbots and agents that are developed to provide support at different levels in the economy. While Africans have been part of different inventions and advanced technologies, they have mostly been low-level participants.
At the heart of artificial intelligence is natural language processing and speech technology. Though Africans have been major markets of different technologies, they have mostly been consumers rather than active participants. With over 2,000 African languages, Africans are better positioned to lead language technology. Given that many African languages are primarily spoken and endangered, we combine the primary training of native speakers with the knowledge of their cultures and provide the necessary skills to naturally develop AI systems for their languages for developing knowledge systems.
Therefore, Africa Computational Linguistics Summer School (Africomplings) has been positioned to empower and train native speakers or scholars of African languages who are interested in transitioning to the tech industry. Our approach is to spread from the grassroot of every language around Africa, beginning with dataset development to product fabrication. While different approaches focus on technical and large datasets, we are approaching this problem from both non-technical and small datasets.
The rationale behind the non-technical approach is to enable every and any speaker who is interested in technology to use it like an application. Additionally, the approach behind small dataset is that we believe in locality, regularity and subregularity as they have been profoundly argued by Jefferey Heinz, where there are finitely many maps of infinitely many forms. Since we need to combine language description and descriptive generalizations from linguistics, we can combine both linguistics insights into machine learning; machine learning is mostly based on statistical analysis and predictions.
So if you speak a language, you deserve Africomplings!
Vision
Our vision is to provide necessary technological knowledge, skills and empowerment that will enable native speakers and scholars of African languages to not only be consumers of language technological products but also be active participants.
Mission
- To pick one native speaker, at a time and give them one necessary skill and knowledge to build tech products
- To reach all the languages in African continents through thorough description and computation
- To have at least one speaker of every African language develop language tech products
Africomplings 2025 Organizers
Meet the Africomplings 2025 organizing team.
