NaijaNLP: A Survey of Nigerian Low-Resource Languages

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.19784v2
• Date: Thu, 06 Mar 2025 23:45:51 GMT
• Title: NaijaNLP: A Survey of Nigerian Low-Resource Languages
• Authors: Isa Inuwa-Dutse,
• Abstract summary: Three languages -- Hausa, Yorub'a and Igbo -- account for about 60% of the spoken languages in Nigeria.<n>These languages are categorised as low-resource due to insufficient resources to support tasks in computational linguistics.<n>This study presents the first comprehensive review of advancements in low-resource NLP (LR-NLP) research across the three major Nigerian languages.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: With over 500 languages in Nigeria, three languages -- Hausa, Yor\`ub\'a and Igbo -- spoken by over 175 million people, account for about 60% of the spoken languages. However, these languages are categorised as low-resource due to insufficient resources to support tasks in computational linguistics. Several research efforts and initiatives have been presented, however, a coherent understanding of the state of Natural Language Processing (NLP) - from grammatical formalisation to linguistic resources that support complex tasks such as language understanding and generation is lacking. This study presents the first comprehensive review of advancements in low-resource NLP (LR-NLP) research across the three major Nigerian languages (NaijaNLP). We quantitatively assess the available linguistic resources and identify key challenges. Although a growing body of literature addresses various NLP downstream tasks in Hausa, Igbo, and Yor\`ub\'a, only about 25.1% of the reviewed studies contribute new linguistic resources. This finding highlights a persistent reliance on repurposing existing data rather than generating novel, high-quality resources. Additionally, language-specific challenges, such as the accurate representation of diacritics, remain under-explored. To advance NaijaNLP and LR-NLP more broadly, we emphasise the need for intensified efforts in resource enrichment, comprehensive annotation, and the development of open collaborative initiatives.

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