Masakhane

💡 Join the Community Call: How Any Young Person Can Break Into African NLP We are pleased to be having our bi-weekly Masakhane Community Call on Wednesday, 6th August 2025 at 2:00 pm UTC - led by Benjamin Standefer Meet Benjamin: A high schooler who's been building English-Swahili NLP tools for 2 years while serving East African Communities through Education tech. In this session, he'll share: 💡 How he got started in Natural Language Processing Work (NLP) from unlikely origins 🤔 Run an Introductory segment on how you can contribute to NLP too 📈 His experience with empowering African youth in NLP work for low-resource languages like Kiswahili at Binary Tree 🤝 Why Africa's NLP future needs more young unconventional voices This conversation is perfect for: Students, Grassroot Builders, and Anyone who is curious to get into contributing to NLP When? 🗓 Wednesday, 6th August 2025 ⏰ 5:00 PM EAT / 2:00 PM UTC Where? 🔗 Register for the Zoom call here: https://lnkd.in/dryUyuQz #AfricanNLP #Masakhane #YouthInAI #SwahiliNLP

August is off to a brilliant start! We are ecstatic to celebrate the incredible achievements of Masakhane researchers at The 63rd Annual Meeting for the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), a testament to the community’s groundbreaking work in advancing NLP for African languages and beyond. Let’s give a round of applause to these award-winning contributions: 🏆 Best Resource Paper: BRIGHTER: BRIdging the Gap in Human-Annotated Textual Emotion Recognition Datasets for 28 Languages, A milestone in multilingual emotion recognition! 🏆 Best Task Award: SemEval-2024 Task 11: Bridging the Gap in Text-Based Emotion Detection – Setting the standard for inclusive emotion analysis. 🏆 Outstanding Paper Award: Typology-Guided Adaptation for African NLP by Ndapa Nakashole – Pioneering methods to empower low-resource languages. 🏆 Best Social Impact Paper: AfriMed-QA: A Pan-African, Multi-Specialty Medical QA Benchmark Dataset – Bridging critical gaps in healthcare NLP for Africa. These wins highlight Masakhane’s relentless commitment to equity, innovation, and real-world impact in NLP. Each paper not only pushes academic boundaries but also addresses pressing needs for underrepresented languages and communities. To the winners and contribuors to these papers: Your brilliance inspires us all! To the Masakhane community: This is our collective victory! Special thanks to Prof. Ndapa Nakashole, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Shamsuddeen H. Muhammad, PhD Charles Nimo, Vukosi Marivate, Idris Abdulmumin, Seid Muhie YIMAM, Samuel Rutunda, Andiswa Bukula, Lilian D. A. Wanzare, PhD. for their stewardship in the attainment of this great achievement and to every contributor on the papers for their incredible work. #Masakhane #ACL2025 #AfricanNLP

💡 Join the Community Call: Addressing Gender Bias in Machine Translation for African Languages We are excited to invite you to an Important Masakhane Community Call on "Gender Bias in Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages: Challenges and Solutions", led by Walelign Tewabe. While gender bias in high-resource language pairs has been extensively studied, African languages face compounded challenges of data scarcity and underrepresentation, leading to amplified biases in translation systems with real-world consequences. In this session, we'll: 💡 Examine how Machine Translation systems perpetuate stereotypes through concrete examples 🤔 Analyze findings from English-Amharic translation research 📈 Evaluate practical mitigation strategies for low-resource contexts 🤝 Discuss collaborative approaches to build more equitable NLP systems This conversation is critical for AI researchers, linguists, policymakers, and anyone passionate about ethical technology. When? 🗓 Wednesday, 23rd July 2025 ⏰ 5:00 PM EAT / 2:00 PM UTC Where? 🔗 Register for the Zoom call here: https://lnkd.in/d5HXwjB7 #ResponsibleAI #MachineTranslation #AfricanNLP #AfricanTech #AIEthics #Masakhane

✨ CELEBRATING OUR DEEP LEARNING INDABAX SA 2025 PARTNERS! ✨ As we gear up for an unforgettable Deep Learning Indaba𝕏 South Africa 2025, the excitement is electric, and it’s all made possible by the phenomenal support of our visionary partners. These organisations share our belief in the power of African talent, in fostering excellence in AI and machine learning, and in empowering the next generation of innovators to push the boundaries of what’s possible. 🌟 Let’s give a huge, thunderous shout-out to the incredible partners making this year’s Indaba𝕏 SA a reality: 👏 Our 2025 Partners: National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences InstaDeep takealot.com IBM NOSIBLE Alphawave Group Sand Technologies RadixTrie GroundUp Deep Learning Indaba Stellenbosch University Institute of Mine Seismology Data Science for Social Impact (DSFSI) AI Safety Cape Town DSTI-NRF CoE-MaSS Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) CHPC Student Cluster Competition South African AI Association Zindi AIMS South Africa AI Media Group Masakhane The Simons Computational Neuroscience Imbizo Sisonke Biotek Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research …and a heartfelt thanks to all universities and organisations who continue to champion the spirit of Indaba𝕏! 💡 To our sponsors: Your commitment is invaluable. You are directly empowering individuals, enabling ground-breaking research, and building a stronger, more inclusive AI ecosystem in South Africa. From all of us at Indaba𝕏: THANK YOU for making 2025 possible. 🚀 Get ready for a few inspiring days of learning, connecting, and shaping the future of AI. We can’t wait to welcome you! #Indaba𝕏SA2025 #Indaba𝕏SA #ThankYouSponsors #AIForAfrica

Exciting Updates from Masakhane! 🌍✨ The Masakhane community is revamping its Community Calls – and we want you to be part of it! 🎙️ These calls are a vibrant space to share knowledge, discuss African NLP advancements, and connect with researchers, practitioners, and enthusiasts across the continent (and beyond!). Whether you’re working on a cool project, have insights to share, or just want to engage with the community, we’d love to hear from you! 📢 Calling all speakers! Want to present your work, lead a discussion, or demo something exciting? Register on this link to speak during our upcoming calls:👉 https://lnkd.in/drwrSMKs Let’s continue building the future of NLP for African languages, by Africans! 💡 #Masakhane #NLP #MachineLearning #AfricanTech #Community #CallForSpeakers #AI

✨ Exciting News from Masakhane! ✨ Today, at the NLP Symposium during #GAISAfrica2025, we proudly announced the launch of the Masakhane African Languages AI Hub—an initiative dedicated to advancing African NLP! This milestone has been made possible through the incredible support of the AI for Development Funders Collaborative https://lnkd.in/dfEAmqTx: Gates Foundation, International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office & Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH 🚀 We are also thrilled to share that google.org has committed an initial $3M grant to kickstart the first set of projects for the hub! The vision for this hub was shaped through a series of workshops held last year, where members of the African NLP community came together to discuss key challenges and opportunities. These discussions played a crucial role in structuring the hub’s focus areas and ensuring it reflects the needs of researchers, practitioners, and communities working with African languages. As a result, the hub will focus on three key pillars: 📌 Data – Expanding access to high-quality African language datasets 📌 Research – Supporting cutting-edge NLP research for African languages 📌 Innovation – Driving real-world applications and impact This is just the beginning—join us as we build a future where African languages are fully represented in AI. 🌍💡 Kathleen Siminyu David Ifeoluwa Adelani Hatem Haddad Salomey Osei Andiswa Bukula Salomon Kabongo KABENAMUALU Tajuddeen Gwadabe Jade Abbott Vukosi Marivate Lilian D. A. Wanzare, PhD. Pelonomi Moiloa Howard Lakougna Laurent Elder Antony Herrmann Balthas Seibold Daniel Brumund Deshni Govender Anstes Agnew Joseph Hassine Marco Lohse #Masakhane #AfricanNLP #AIforGood #LanguageAI #GAISAfrica2025

One week to go. Submit your paper to the 6th AfricaNLP Workshop co-located with ACL 2025 Deadline: March 7, 2025

📢 We’re Hiring! Join Masakhane AI Hub in Building the Future of African AI Last two week at the Paris AI Action Summit, Masakhane joined a historic moment—one that set the foundation for a new era of African language AI. With a $10M commitment from Gates Foundation, Canada, UK, and BMZ, the world is beginning to recognize that language representation in AI is not just a technical challenge—it’s an issue of inclusion, equity, and global innovation. The challenge is clear: Less than 1% of AI training data is in African languages, yet over 1 billion Africans depend on them in daily life. Masakhane is rising to meet this challenge—and we need the right team to make it happen. 🚀 We are now hiring for five key leadership roles: ✅ Hub Director – Lead the strategic vision and drive the Hub’s mission ✅ Program Manager & MEL Lead – Oversee project execution and impact measurement ✅ Grants & Operations Manager –  Lead the grant life cycle, manage funding and grant processes ✅ Finance & Accounting Lead – Ensure financial sustainability and accountability ✅ Community & Partnerships Lead – Grow the African NLP community and and build partnerships that enable the Hub to unlock the transformative potential of AI for African languages 🌍 As a member of the founding team, you will be the entrepreneurs launching the Hub - and growing it to its full potential. We are looking for bold, ambitious leaders who believe in the power of African NLP and AI to inclusivity, social good, and the democratization of AI technologies. 📢 If you’re ready to help build the AI ecosystem Africa needs—apply now! 🔗 View open positions here: https://lnkd.in/dmpXc2sP 📅 Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis—early applications encouraged! Let’s make AI truly inclusive, representative, and impactful. Tag your networks, share this opportunity, and let’s build the future of African language AI together. 🚀✨ #AfricanNLP #AIforAfrica #Masakhane #LanguageAI #Hiring #AIJobs #remotejobs