HausaNLP Research Group got funding from Lacuna Fund.

The HausaNLP proposal called SentiNaija is one of the selected projects in the Lacuna Language 2020 Awards, an action promoted by Lacuna Fund, the first collaborative initiative in the world dedicated to providing the resources that data scientists, researchers, and social entrepreneurs need to produce labelled datasets in order to address the main issues within their communities.

The main goal of the project is to promote global digital inclusion by producing the first high-quality open datasets with manual annotations, gathered from content included on digital platforms and written in the three main Nigerian languages: Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, and Pidgin. These datasets are important for natural language processing tasks such as sentiment and emotion analysis, as well as the detection of hate speech and fake news.

Languages spoken in Africa have few language resources, and those that do exist are insufficient, e.g., datasets for important artificial intelligence (AI) tasks. This project will play a key role in the development of information for African languages, encouraging the growth and dissemination of AI research in these locations and benefiting from these datasets.Find out more about the project on the preject Github page