The African Data Scientist

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a hot area of research and application in the field of AI, but why should it matter to us as Africans? In this episode, we had a conversation with Salomon Kabongo KABENAMUALU, an NLP researcher at the African Master’s in Machine Intelligence (AMMI) which is a program under the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS).

In this episode, you'll learn (with timestamps);

6:01 - What life is like as an African researcher. 

8:39 - What Natural Language Processing is and why it should matter to us as Africans.

11:49 - Why Salomon chose to make NLP research as opposed to other areas of technology.

14:36 - The current state of NLP technology in Africa.

17:26 - The challenges surrounding the progress of NLP for African problems.

20:45 - Salomon's prediction on how long it would take researchers to overcome the challenges halting the progress of NLP technology in Africa.

23:42 - Steps being taken to make NLP systems "responsible" for Africans.

 28:40 - Specific applications that NLP could be very optimal for that problems-solvers in Africa should be aware of.

32:00 - How these problem-solvers can leverage the *stable* progress in NLP and avoid getting caught up by the hype of the latest advancements.

35:35 - Pitfalls to avoid for African Data Scientists getting started learning and applying NLP to solve African problems.

39:40 - How global improvements in NLP in the coming years will affect how we apply the technology to solve African problems.

45:10 - Resources for Africans looking to learn more about NLP in the context of Africa.

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Salomon’s;

>  LinkedIn

>  Twitter

>  Website

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> Learn from one of our guest facilitator’s (Aurélién Geron) workshop on “Natural Language Processing in Action Using Transformers in TensorFlow 2.0” here.

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LINK(S) MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE:

Mashanke NLP

Deep Learning Indaba

Professor Julia's episode Salomon referenced during the podcast here.

Speech and Language Processing (3rd ed. draft) by Dan Jurafsky and James H. Martin here.

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