Expert advocate data curation to advance African language technology

A renowned Language Technologist, Dr Tunde Adegbola, has advocated for the curating and preservation of data in African languages to strengthen technological development in the continent.

Adegbola, Founder of the African Language Technology Initiative (ALT-i), advocated this on Monday in Ibadan, while speaking on bridging gaps in human language technology and natural language processing.

The expert explained that language technology was central to artificial intelligence (AI), adding that many people today only knew about AI because of tools like ChatGPT.

According to him, the mission of ALT-i is to ensure that no African is excluded from the information age simply because they do not speak a foreign language.

”Our vision is to make sure that Africans can fully participate in the digital economy in their own languages, without needing English as a gateway.”

He said that ALT-i had produced PhDs and researchers in Nigeria and in the diaspora; many of whom were making impacts globally.

The expert said the priority was to encourage more universities to take the field seriously, while also building a pipeline from theory to practice in technology development.

”Significantly, Alt-i partnered with Microsoft to localise Windows and Office (Vista through Windows 10) for Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa languages.

”In spite of limited uptake, the project marked a milestone in making technology linguistically accessible,” he said.

Adegbola also urged journalists, broadcasters and media houses to document and store African language content systematically so that it could accumulate into big data that would be useful for technology development.

”When I was a broadcast engineer, I saw how news bulletins written in English were translated into Yoruba, handwritten, read on air, and then discarded.

“That paper thrown in the bin would have been gold today. I can access over 100 years of the New York Times daily editions, but the most consistent Yoruba newspaper, Alaroye, is only about 20 years old, ” he said.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), reports that Adegbola, often referred to as a polymath, began a month-long exhibition to showcase culture and technology intersections.