Vous êtes tous cordialement invité à assister au 3e séminaire au DIC, session hiver 2022, en partenariat avec l'ISC et le CRIA. 

Houssein Ahmed ASSOWEH – 10 février 2022 à 10h30 

Titre : AI and inclusion - How about African NLP projects?

Résumé :

AI has nowadays become an indispensable lever for economic and technological development and especially for reducing the digital divide in developing countries. However, Africa lags far behind in this area due to the weakness of its infrastructure and the lack of data to develop applications using machine learning. This lack of data is especially penalizing in the field of languages, since with more than 2000 languages spoken in Africa, few have the linguistic resources; many African languages risk disappearing in a few decades if nothing is done about it by the NLP and AI communities.  Thus, the development of linguistic data remains essential to initiate cutting-edge research in AI such as neural machine translation, automatic speech recognition, language understanding, etc. This presentation is about our current research, which concerns the automatic processing of African languages in general and the Somali language in particular, which is an Afro-Asiatic language spoken by approximately 23 M speakers living mainly in 4 countries of the horn of Africa (Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Djibouti). We will discuss the different methods used to build bilingual or parallel corpora and their utility for the construction of neural machine translation systems from and to Somali, with English or French as the target or source language.

Bio :

Dr Houssein Ahmed Assoweh is currently a professor in computer science and director of the mathematics and digital research center at the University of Djibouti. He obtained a doctorate in computer science in 2019 from the University of Grenoble-Alpes, France.  His postdoctoral studies were carried out within the NLP group of CRIA-UQAM, with the PCBF funding. His research lies at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Science (DS) and focuses on Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computational Linguistics and Machine Learning, especially for the development of artificial intelligence applications and tools for African languages among other under-resourced languages.

S.V.P. Vous connecter au moins 10 à 15 minutes avant l'heure et inscrire votre nom complet pour aider à vous admettre au séminaire. 

La participation à micro et caméra ouverts est grandement appréciée lors de la période des questions.

Lien Zoom de la rencontre : https://uqam.zoom.us/j/85407268175