{"ID":2859190,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05644","arxiv_id":"2510.05644","title":"The African Languages Lab: A Collaborative Approach to Advancing Low-Resource African NLP","abstract":"Despite representing nearly one-third of the world's languages, African languages remain critically underserved by modern NLP technologies, with 88\\% classified as severely underrepresented or completely ignored in computational linguistics. We present the African Languages Lab (All Lab), a comprehensive research initiative that addresses this technological gap through systematic data collection, model development, and capacity building. Our contributions include: (1) a quality-controlled data collection pipeline, yielding the largest validated African multi-modal speech and text dataset spanning 40 languages with 19 billion tokens of monolingual text and 12,628 hours of aligned speech data; (2) extensive experimental validation demonstrating that our dataset, combined with fine-tuning, achieves substantial improvements over baseline models, averaging +23.69 ChrF++, +0.33 COMET, and +15.34 BLEU points across 31 evaluated languages; and (3) a structured research program that has successfully mentored fifteen early-career researchers, establishing sustainable local capacity. Our comparative evaluation against Google Translate reveals competitive performance in several languages while identifying areas that require continued development.","short_abstract":"Despite representing nearly one-third of the world's languages, African languages remain critically underserved by modern NLP technologies, with 88\\% classified as severely underrepresented or completely ignored in computational linguistics. We present the African Languages Lab (All Lab), a comprehensive research initi...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05644","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.05644v1","authors":"[\"Sheriff Issaka\",\"Keyi Wang\",\"Yinka Ajibola\",\"Oluwatumininu Samuel-Ipaye\",\"Zhaoyi Zhang\",\"Nicte Aguillon Jimenez\",\"Evans Kofi Agyei\",\"Abraham Lin\",\"Rohan Ramachandran\",\"Sadick Abdul Mumin\",\"Faith Nchifor\",\"Mohammed Shuraim\",\"Lieqi Liu\",\"Erick Rosas Gonzalez\",\"Sylvester Kpei\",\"Jemimah Osei\",\"Carlene Ajeneza\",\"Persis Boateng\",\"Prisca Adwoa Dufie Yeboah\",\"Saadia Gabriel\"]","published":"2025-10-07T07:42:52Z","proceeding":"cs.CL","tasks":"[\"cs.CL\",\"cs.AI\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}