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
Organization: University of California, Los Angeles

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.