While at EMNLP 2022, Daniel got a chance to sit down with an amazing group of researchers creating NLP technology that actually works for their local language communities. Just Zwennicker (Universiteit van Amsterdam) discusses his work on a machine translation system for Sranan Tongo, a creole language that is spoken in Suriname. Andiswa Bukula (SADiLaR), Rooweither Mabuya (SADiLaR), and Bonaventure Dossou (Lanfrica, Mila) discuss their work with Masakhane to strengthen and spur NLP research in African languages, for Africans, by Africans.

The group emphasized the need for more linguistically diverse NLP systems that work in scenarios of data scarcity, non-Latin scripts, rich morphology, etc. You don’t want to miss this one!

From drug discovery at the Quebec AI Institute to improving capabilities with low-resourced languages at the Masakhane Research Foundation and Google AI, Bonaventure Dossou looks for opportunities to use his expertise in natural language processing to improve the world - and especially to help his homeland in the Benin Republic in Africa.