As a pan-African university with people from all over Africa, Ashesi University is uniquely positioned to contribute to the development of datasets that can advance the state of NLP in Africa and, of course, in Ghana. Thus, a key area of focus for NLP researchers at Ashesi is the development of datasets for African languages which can be used for training and evaluating NLP models as well as exploring various research questions. In 2022, we released the financial inclusion speech dataset for Ghanaian languages.

Undergraduate students at Ashesi University also work with faculty on various NLP projects. In 2018, David Sasu worked with his supervisor to develop a speech recognition system that allowed users to search for and play Twi songs on YouTube. You can read his project here: Developing a Functional NLP System with Limited Data. David is currently a PhD candidate at IT University of Copenhagen (ITU) where he is researching on NLP in low resource settings.

In 2019, Maame Yaa Osei and her supervisor worked on a project called Reflect with the goal of teaching Machine Learning models to reconsider their biases. You can read her project here: Reflect: Teaching machine learning models to reconsider their biases. Maame Yaa is currently a technology analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

These are just a few examples of NLP projects undertaken by Ashesi faculty and students. Ashesi also collaborates with other organizations to advance the state of NLP in Africa and our researchers are always open to partner with organizations on projects.