All Lab

The African Languages Lab (All Lab) is a not-for-profit collaborative gathering of researchers from all walks of life to bring the knowledge of their languages to foster the awareness, curation, digitization, ingestion, translation, and understanding of African languages. This collective effort, led by language experts, academics, linguists, native speakers, researchers, librarians, and thinkers, seeks to build robust Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems such as Machine Translation (MT) for African languages.

African Languages Landscape

Underrepresented and unknown to many, African languages (over 2000) represent a third of all world languages. Despite their cultural significance, diversity, history, symbolic meaning, and wealth, little work has been done to preserve and solidify their presence in modern technologies such as AI.

This number should not be too surprising given the sheer size of the African continent. Africa is the second largest continent, only behind Asia, and accounts for over 20% of earth's land mass.

African Languages Recognition

African languages have seen very little effort with respect to gaining recognition in technological interfaces. For example, only 23 of the over 2000 African languages can be accessed through Google Translate.

Compounding this problem is the nonexistence or little existence of language data for most African languages. Hence, the need for expanding access to AI solutions and digitized language material for these languages.

All Lab Goals

Research

Collaborating with language experts, academics, linguists, native speakers, researchers, librarians, and thinkers, the All Lab seeks to be the leader in Open-Sourced AI Research, architectural design, data collection, and language comprehension for African languages.

Information Hub

The All Lab Works to make Accurate Information About African Languages Readily Available and Accessible In order to make it easy for All Person Seeking to Work, Localize, or Research In this space.

The Ubuntu Approach

We are guided by the African concept of uBuntu: a belief that affirms the positive values of community, difference, antiracism, hospitality, and openness to others.

The All Lab builds roadmaps of strategies, methodologies, and centralized resources for building, democratizing, and innovating AI technologies that facilitate effective communication in, and localizing for, African languages.

Explore the All Lab

Facts & Figures

The All Lab creates an information hub of accurate facts and figures coupled with state-of-the-art and mostly interactive visualizations for better understanding of African Languages.

Collaborative Research

The All Lab builds roadmaps of strategies, methodologies, and centralized resources for constructing, democratizing, and innovating AI technologies that facilitate effective communication in, and localizing for, African languages.