Paper ID: 2303.14406

Natural Language Processing in Ethiopian Languages: Current State, Challenges, and Opportunities

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Israel Abebe Azime, Abinew Ali Ayele, Moges Ahmed Mehamed, Olga Kolesnikova, Seid Muhie Yimam

This survey delves into the current state of natural language processing (NLP) for four Ethiopian languages: Amharic, Afaan Oromo, Tigrinya, and Wolaytta. Through this paper, we identify key challenges and opportunities for NLP research in Ethiopia. Furthermore, we provide a centralized repository on GitHub that contains publicly available resources for various NLP tasks in these languages. This repository can be updated periodically with contributions from other researchers. Our objective is to identify research gaps and disseminate the information to NLP researchers interested in Ethiopian languages and encourage future research in this domain.

Submitted: Mar 25, 2023