UP Expert Lecture Series: ‘Riendzo ri lehile: Tackling Natural Language Processing for African languages to make better sense of our world’

Recorded Live Stream

The recorded live stream is available Video

Talk Details

The Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Pretoria, Professor Tawana Kupe, cordially invites you to the hybrid 30th lecture in the UP Expert Lecture Series: “Riendzo ri lehile: Tackling Natural Language Processing for African languages to make better sense of our world”. Presented by Professor Vukosi Marivate, ABSA UP Chair of Data Science at the Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology, University of Pretoria.

Low-resourced languages pose an interesting challenge for machine learning algorithms, representation, data collection and accessibility of machine learning in general. For African languages this challenge is even more consequential as it also coincides with the challenges of shaping the current revolution in artificial intelligence with the global landscape. In this talk I present our research work over the past few years, on working to make sure that African-language as well as local-language tasks count when we talk about the fourth industrial revolution. The work covers new approaches in modelling, data collection and community building in order to create the perfect environment for creativity, innovation and archiving across South African languages and beyond.

The UP Expert Lecture Series provides a public platform for UP researchers to engage with a general audience on significant developments in their fields of expertise that are likely to have an impact in the future. We invite you to participate in our hour-long Expert Lecture Series and to be enriched and informed by the University’s research output.

Video, Slides and Notes

Public Lecture Video + Q&A

Slides

• PDF Slides(comments open) - Link

Notes

DSFSI Research and Tools

• Our publications - https://dsfsi.github.io/publications/
• Masakhane Translate Web Tool - http://translate.masakhane.io/

Community

• Masakhane NLP https://www.masakhane.io/
• Deep Learning Indaba https://deeplearningindaba.com/

Call to action

• Dr V Marivate talk @ Council for Higher Education - 4IR and Transformation in Higher Education: Building a Grassroot Machine Learning /Artificial Intelligence Community: The Case for Cooperation over Competition in a Small Pond. Youtube
• Get in touch vukosi.marivate@cs.up.ac.za
• DSFSI Newsletter https://tinyletter.com/datascience-up/

News and Media

• NLP enables speakers of African languages to make better sense of our world [URL]