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Kedir Yassin Hussen

Publications and source records attributed to Kedir Yassin Hussen.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

The Rise of AfricaNLP: A Survey of Contributions, Contributors, Community Impact, and Bibliometric Analysis

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is undergoing constant transformation, as Large Language Models (LLMs) are driving daily breakthroughs in research and practice. In this regard, tracking the progress of NLP research and automatically analyzing the contributions of research papers provides key insights into the nature of the field and the researchers. This study explores the progress of African NLP (AfricaNLP) by asking (and answering) research questions about the progress of AfricaNLP (publications, NLP topics, and NLP tasks), contributions (data, method, and task), and contributors (authors, affiliated institutions, and funding bodies). We quantitatively examine two decades (2005 - 2025) of contributions to AfricaNLP research, using a dataset of 2.2K NLP papers, 4.9K contributing authors, and 7.8K human-annotated contribution sentences (AfricaNLPContributions), along with benchmark results. Our dataset and AfricaNLP research explorer tool will provide a powerful lens for tracing AfricaNLP research trends and holds potential for generating data-driven research approaches. The resource can be found in GitHub.

cs.CL

The State of Large Language Models for African Languages: Progress and Challenges

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming Natural Language Processing (NLP), but their benefits are largely absent for Africa's 2,000 low-resource languages. This paper comparatively analyzes African language coverage across six LLMs, eight Small Language Models (SLMs), and six Specialized SLMs (SSLMs). The evaluation covers language coverage, training sets, technical limitations, script problems, and language modelling roadmaps. The work identifies 42 supported African languages and 23 available public data sets, and it shows a big gap where four languages (Amharic, Swahili, Afrikaans, and Malagasy) are always treated while there is over 98\% of unsupported African languages. Moreover, the review shows that just Latin, Arabic, and Ge'ez scripts are identified while 20 active scripts are neglected. Some of the primary challenges are lack of data, tokenization biases, computational costs being very high, and evaluation issues. These issues demand language standardization, corpus development by the community, and effective adaptation methods for African languages.

cs.AI