The African Languages Lab: A Collaborative Approach to Advancing Low-Resource African NLP
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
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.
