#masakhane

„Masakhane - Building Together

»Masakhane« roughly translates to »We build together« in isiZulu.
Our goal is Africaans to shape and own these technological advances towards human dignity, well-being and equity, through inclusive community building, open participatory research and multidisciplinarity.

Masakhane is a grassroots organization whose aim is to strengthen NLP research in African languages.
African languages are severely underrepresented in technology at large due to the lasting destructive impact of politics and resource allocation.

The Masakhane project highlights the lack of geographic diversity in natural language processing research and researchers.
For example, the number of publications and the amount of available data do not correlate with the number of speakers.
Igbo, which is spoken by 27 million people, has much less data than Dutch Creole Afrikaans, which has around 17 million speakers, or Icelandic, which has 1 million speakers.
(...)
We think of AI as constantly expanding and affecting all services, but how can people access those services, when it's not accessible in their own language?“

#AIxDesign #SlowAI #SmallAI #AI #LeoScarin #NadiaNadesan #Masakhane #IsiZulu #Igbo #Africa #AfricanLanguages