NLP for Under-resourced African Languages
Date: 23 March 2023, Thursday
Time: 9:00 AM PT / 12:00 PM ET
Format: Virtual via Zoom
David Ìfẹ́olúwa Adélaní
DeepMind Academic Fellow - University College London
Jay Alammar
Director, Engineering Fellow (NLP) - Cohere
There are over 7100 languages spoken by humans around the world, yet the vast majority of language models only support the English Language.
This makes it incredibly challenging to build products and projects using multilingual language understanding. In this talk, David addresses the challenges faced in NLP research and development for African Languages, which are spoken by over a billion people.
David will also share his findings of human-annotated named entity recognition (NER) datasets and the development of Multilingual pre-trained language models (PLMs) for 20 widely spoken languages in Africa through multilingual adaptive fine-tuning (MAFT).
Speaker Bio
David Ifeoluwa Adelani is a Research Fellow or DeepMind Academic Fellow in the department of Computer Science at University College London, and a member of the leadership of Masakhane - a grassroots organization whose mission is to strengthen and spur natural language processing (NLP) research in African languages, for Africans, by Africans.
He was formerly a PhD student of computer science at the department of language science and technology at Saarland University. His research focuses on NLP for under-resourced languages, especially African languages, multilingual representation learning, machine translation, and privacy in NLP.