Africa has over 2000 languages. Despite this, African languages account for a small portion of available resources and publications in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This is due to multiple factors, including: a lack of focus from government and funding, discoverability, a lack of community, sheer language complexity, difficulty in reproducing papers and no benchmarks to compare techniques. To begin to address the identified problems, MASAKHANE, an open-source, continent-wide, distributed, online research effort for machine translation for African languages, was founded. In this paper, we discuss our methodology for building the community and spurring research from the African continent, as well as outline the success of the community in terms of addressing the identified problems affecting African NLP.

中文翻译：

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Masakhane -- 非洲机器翻译

非洲有2000多种语言。尽管如此，非洲语言只占自然语言处理 (NLP) 可用资源和出版物的一小部分。这是由于多种因素造成的，包括：缺乏政府和资金的关注、可发现性、缺乏社区、纯粹的语言复杂性、复制论文的困难以及没有比较技术的基准。为了开始解决已发现的问题，MASAKHANE 成立，这是一个开源的、覆盖整个大陆的、分布式的非洲语言机器翻译在线研究项目。在本文中，我们讨论了我们建立社区和促进非洲大陆研究的方法，并概述了社区在解决影响非洲 NLP 的已确定问题方面的成功。