Workshop on Transcribing African Languages for Artificial Intelligence Applications

Creating robust corpora, standardizing writing rules, and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration are critical first steps for leveraging African languages in the digital age. It’s essential to create large, annotated textual corpora because these datasets are the foundational « food » needed to train Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, enabling crucial applications like speech recognition and machine translation for local languages. Furthermore, standardizing orthography and grammar is necessary to ensure that the AI models can process input consistently, overcoming the current challenge of high variability and regional differences in writing, which otherwise makes the data unusable for computational tasks …