'Riendzo ri lehile: Tackling Natural Language Processing for African languages to make better sense of our world'

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.