A lecturer at the University of Cape Coast’s Department of Mathematics has been awarded a $30,000 Google research grant to carry out artificial intelligence (AI) research.
Dr. Stephen Moore, who is also a co-founder of Ghana Natural Language Processing (Ghana NLP), received the honour in order to hasten the study of natural language processing (NLP) in African and Ghanaian languages with limited resources.
The goal of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) subfield known as Natural Language Processing is to enable computers to process languages similarly to humans.
Since 2020, Dr. Moore and his colleagues at Ghana NLP have been creating translation tools for low-resource languages like Twi, Dagbani, Ewe, Ga, Guruni, Igbo, etc. for both text and speech.
Dr. Moore presented the current state of NLP development in Ghana and the opportunities the nation will gain by preparing and developing young people for the future at the reopening of Google’s new office in Accra, Ghana, in 2022.
He introduced Khaya, the first Ghanaian language translator that Ghana NLP had launched alongside Algorine (a partner company of Ghana NLP).
The application aims to develop a unified translator for a number of African languages using cutting-edge NLP language models.
Google gave the gift in appreciation for Ghana NLP’s efforts in both the creation of such crucial tools and the instruction of Ghana NLP volunteers.
Ghana NLP is a social enterprise that aims to make NLP more accessible to Ghanaians by providing training, workshops, and seminars. It is the first such award given by Google to a Ghanaian researcher.
