As part of the activities of its general assembly marking the end of the year 2020 and the beginning of 2021, the association New Technologies for African Languages organizes, for the second time, a scientific workshop around the issues of NLP with regards to poorly endowed languages of Africa. This edition will take place on February 19, 2021 simultaneously online on NTeALan’s webinar platform and at the association’s headquarters (NTeALan multimedia center), located in Douala-Makepe, Tradex Parcours vita (opposite “Majestic Pressing”).
This workshop will bring together NTeALan’s large community of members living in Cameroon and abroad, invited researchers, partners and other members of the scientific community. This workshop aims at bringing together professionals, researchers and experts in African languages and Natural Language Processing (NLP), whose research work focuses on machine learning techniques and electronic lexicography applied to NLP and language pedagogy/didactics. We will also discuss the main challenges that arise in this context for the constitution of corpora in African languages. We will define possible directions for future progress.
In summary, this workshop is an opportunity for the participants and the audience to :
- review outstanding work on the constitution of datasets useful for the African languages processing.
- present the latest advances in NLP applied to African languages.
- present the platforms, datasets and softwares currently available on the market for processing African languages.
- evaluate and challenge the NLP approaches, methods and techniques currently used to process African languages.
- boost digital industries favourable to the digitisation of African languages.
To build their presentations for the workshop, speakers will be able todraw inspiration from the following themes (non-exhaustive list) :
- Electronic Lexicography
- Codification and Xmlisation of dictionaries
- Knowledge Representation
- Methods for building up lexical resources
- Tokenization, Lemmatization, POS
- Application of lexicographical data for NLP tools
- Machine translation for African languages
- Speech recognition and synthesis in African languages
- Semantic classification of documents
- Speech synthesis / Audio recognition
- Named-entities Recognition in African languages
- Question-answer system, Chatbot, NLU
- Text extraction from images, PDFs, etc.
Scientific committee:
- Pr Jules Assoumou
- Pr Ndibnu Messina
- Dr Ornella Wandji
- M. Elvis MBONING
Contacts : levismboning@ntealan.org ; workshop@ntealan.org
