The African Languages Lab: A Collaborative Approach to Advancing Low-Resource African NLP
Sheriff Issaka, Keyi Wang, Yinka Ajibola, Oluwatumininu Samuel-Ipaye, Zhaoyi Zhang University of Wisconsin - Madison, Nicte Aguillon Jimenez University of Wisconsin - Madison, Evans Kofi Agyei, Abraham Lin 等 20 位作者
Despite representing nearly one-third of the world’s languages, African languages remain critically underserved by modern NLP technologies, with 88% classified as severely underrepresented or completely ignored in computational linguistics. We present the African Languages Lab (All Lab), a comprehensive research initiative that addresses this technological gap through systematic data collection, model development, and empirical analysis. Our contributions include: (1) a quality-controlled data collection pipeline, yielding the largest validated African multi-modal speech and text dataset spanning 40 languages with 19 billion text tokens and 12,628 hours of aligned speech data; (2) extensive experimental validation demonstrating that even modest-scale models, when fine-tuned on targeted language data, achieve substantial improvements over untrained baselines, averaging +23.69 ChrF++, +0.33 COMET, and +15.34 BLEU points across 31 evaluated languages; and (3) a comparative analysis against Google Translate in which a 1B-parameter model matched or surpassed the commercial system in several languages including Yoruba and Twi, revealing that data scarcity, rather than model scale, constitutes the primary bottleneck for low-resource NLP, and suggesting that systematic dataset development yields disproportionate returns for low-resource languages.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表