Ashesi University’s Computer Science Faculty and volunteer team – spearheaded by Dennis Asamoah Owusu and David Sampah – has published new tools to help software developers build applications in Twi (Asante, Akuapim, Fante) and Ga, two of Ghana’s most dominant languages. This is part of a greater natural language processing research effort at Ashesi, focusing on African languages.
The team has been working on the project for several years as part of their broader effort to build language datasets for technology development in Ghana. Other Ashesi faculty researchers on the project were Dr. Ayorkor Korsah, Benedict Quartey, Stephane Nwolley Jnr., David Adjepon-Yamoah, and Lily Omane Boateng. The immediate use case for the language dataset is financial services; however, the bulk of the data can also be helpful for software and artificial intelligence training purposes.
The Lacuna Fund, which supported the project, is a collaborative funding effort with co-founders, including the Rockefeller Foundation, Google.org, Canada International Development Research Centre, and GIZ’s FAIR Forward programme. The Fund seeks to provide data scientists, researchers, and social entrepreneurs with the resources needed to address an underserved population or problem, augment existing datasets to be more representative, or update old datasets to be more sustainable.
In 2020, Dennis Asamoah Owusu’s startup , Nokwary Technologies won the Ecobank Fintech Challenge for developing an AI-powered banking solution for non-English speakers. His solution, selected out of over 600 submissions, allows financial transactions through popular apps like Whatsapp. By publishing this new dataset, Dennis and David hope to democratise the language resources Nokwary Technologies used and inspire the open-sourcing of other African language tools.
Source: Ashesi University
