Join the July 27th NLP-CoP Open Meeting: Applying NLP to Qualitative MERL in African Contexts

Efforts are underway to support and advance Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Africa, recognizing the importance of language as a means of communication and identity. With Africa being home to a rich linguistic diversity, the challenge lies in developing technology that can cater to the continent’s numerous languages. Collaborative initiatives have been organized to address this gap, focusing on training speech recognition models, sentiment analysis, and collecting speech data for African languages. These endeavors aim to enhance NLP skills, increase awareness, and promote open-source datasets for research and development in African languages.

Our NLP in African Contexts Working Group explores some of these areas including the inclusion/exclusion of African languages, capacity strengthening needs for African MERL practitioners and young evaluators, and specific use cases relevant to MERL professionals working in African countries.

July 27 CoP Meeting

Join us on Thursday, July 27, 2023 for our next NLP-CoP Open meeting (6am PST / 9am ET / 2pm UK / 3pm CET / 3pm SAST / 6:30 Delhi / 9pm Manila).

Please let us know if you would be keen to be a presenter at one of our future meetings!

Speakers Korstiaan Wapenaar (Genesis Analytics), Jerusha Govender (Data Innovators) and Mmoloki Sello (Botswana Family Welfare Association) will:

• give an overview of the potential of NLP in African contexts
• provide case examples and practical tips
• discuss challenges and concerns such as language exclusion, data quality and bias in data sets, and lack of resources for training relevant models
• suggest possible ways that we can collaborate to address challenges and build on opportunities

The call will be facilitated by Mutsa Chinyamakobvu, NLP in Africa Working Group Lead, and Cathy Richards, NLP Secretariat. There will be ample time for participants to share their own experiences, tips, ideas, and concerns.

This meeting is open to all, NLP-CoP member and non-member alike.

Register now!

Register here to join the meeting. (Upon registration, you will receive a link for the call).

Join the NLP-CoP!

The NLP-CoP welcomes all Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning (MERL) practitioners and data practitioners interested in using text analytics approaches for MERL in the development, humanitarian, peacebuilding, and related social sectors. All MERL practitioners are welcome, no prior knowledge of text analytics is needed. Specialist data scientists and NLP specialists are also welcome. Working Group meetings will cover both technical and non-technical aspects; e.g. ethical and inclusive use.

To join please fill in this form indicating your agreement and alignment with the NLP-CoP Charter and Code of Conduct.