The African Languages Lab: A Collaborative Approach to Advancing
  Low-Resource African NLP
Authors: name: Sheriff Issaka; name: Keyi Wang; name: Yinka Ajibola; name: Oluwatumininu Samuel-Ipaye; name: Zhaoyi Zhang; name: Nicte Aguillon Jimenez; name: Evans Kofi Agyei; name: Abraham Lin; name: Rohan Ramachandran; name: Sadick Abdul Mumin; name: Faith Nchifor; name: Mohammed Shuraim; name: Lieqi Liu; name: Erick Rosas Gonzalez; name: Sylvester Kpei; name: Jemimah Osei; name: Carlene Ajeneza; name: Persis Boateng; name: Prisca Adwoa Dufie Yeboah; name: Saadia Gabriel
Published: 2025-10-07 07:42:52

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.