Recently, there has been a realization that language technologies have been leaving certain languages behind - including most African languages. While Google Translate offers translation services in several African languages, no Ghanaian languages are included, and even for the included languages the quality has been generally found to be quite poor. Major challenges boil down to lack of good (indeed often any) training data, as well as lack of adoption of major language technologies for local problems.
Ghana NLP is an Open Source Initiative focused on Natural Language Processing (NLP) of Ghanaian Languages, & its Applications to Local Problems. While we will begin work on Ghanaian languages initially, likely focusing on Twi due to number of speakers, our ultimate goal is for our tools to be applicable throughout the West African subregion and beyond.
- Develop better data sources to train state-of-the-art (SOTA) NLP techniques for Ghanaian languages.
- Contribute to adapting SOTA techiques to work better in a lower resource setting such as this one.
- Build functional systems for local applications, e.g., a “Google Translate” for Twi, Ewe, Frafra, etc.
Team
Achievement
Team members
We help agencies to define their new business objectives and then create the road map
GhanaNLP conducts research in Natural Language Processing
Our independent benefactors, free from the internal demands, can focus on what really matters.
KHAYA
We have released the first ever translator for Ghanaian languages based in Artificial Intelligence. For more details, kindly visit the Google Playstore Download Google App
GHANA NLP - COMPUTATIONAL MAPPING OF GHANAIAN LANGUAGES
Beyond translation, fundamental tools for computational analysis are lacking. Tools for summarization, classification, language detection, voice-to-text transcription are limited, and in most cases completely nonexistent. It is a major risk to Ghanaian national security — availability of these tools is directly correlated with the sophistication and efficiency of cyber-security solutions that can be deployed to defend critical social, cultural and cyber infrastructure from both internal and external threats.
GhanaNLP participation in events
We use platforms given to us by event organizers to present trending subjects in the industry alongside discuss some projects we've been able to accomplish.
NEURIPS 2020 OVERVIEW - GHANA EDITION
We were privilege to have our leader Dr Paul Azunre, talk about how the progress so far with Natural Language Processing with Ghanaian languages has been and also other interesting matters concerning the community.
NEURIPS 2019 OVERVIEW
The theme of interpretability was particularly prominent for the Natural Language Processing (NLP) works at the conference. AllenNLP – the creators of the ELMo architecture, which sparked the recent pretrained Language model craze that includes its successor BERT – presented their NLP interpretability system “Interpret” as a demo. Interpretability is particularly important for NLP, given that recently all of the state-of-the-art models are neural network models which often come across as “black boxes” with no particular explanation for how they arrive at their predictions..
