127 - Masakhane and Participatory Research for African Languages, with Tosin Adewumi and Perez Ogayo

We invited members of Masakhane, Tosin Adewumi and Perez Ogayo, to
talk about their EMNLP Findings paper that discusses why typical
research is limited for low-resourced NLP and how participatory
research can help.   As a result of participatory research,
Masakhane has many, many success stories: first datasets and
benchmarks in African languages, first research on human evaluation
specifically for MT for low-resource languages, etc. In this
episode, we talked about one of them—MasakhaNER—in more detail. The
hosts for this episode are Pradeep Dasigi and Ana Marasović.
-------------------------- Tosin Adewumi is a PhD student at the
Luleå University of Technology in Sweden. His Twitter handle:
@tosintwit Perez Ogayo is an undergrad student at the African
Leadership University in Rwanda. Her Twitter handle: @a_ogayo
Masakhane is a grassroots organization whose mission is to
strengthen and spur NLP research in African languages, for
Africans, by Africans: https://www.masakhane.io/ Participatory
Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in
African Languages (Findings of EMNLP 2020):
https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02353 MasakhaNER: Named Entity
Recognition for African languages (AfricaNLP Workshop @ EACL 2021):
https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.11811