Objectives

While language technology achieve impressive results on different tasks, African languages continue to lag behind in the rapid advancements of language technology and its applications. Aside from the economic benefits, language technologies have far-reaching impacts on societies – facilitating the study and preservation of languages, access to and management of history and culture, and facilitating deeper understanding across people through shared communication.

The goal of this seminar is to understand the need for language technology, the challenges and opportunities of applying language technology to African languages. By examining the evolution of language technology and its limited application to commercially profitable languages, the course will highlight the need for expansion into other languages for cultural and societal benefits. Students will gain an understanding of how language technology impacts daily life, through examples like smart devices and virtual agents. The caurse also aims to explore the typology of African languages, with a specific focus on Swahili covering the basic grammatical and linguistic structure. We will introduce language processing using computers covering basic concepts, tools, and applications (search engines, speech processing, machine translation, text classification, information extraction, and recommendation system) for processing language with computers and inclusivity in content creation through digital orality, which involves using audiovisual technologies in African languages, helping these languages gain prominence in mainstream spaces.