Challenges and Opportunities in NLP for Under-represented Languages

Natural language processing (NLP) technology has seen tremendous improvements in recent years but most of these successes have been concentrated in languages with large amounts of data. In this talk, I will discuss challenges and potential solutions on the way to scaling NLP to more of the world's 7000 languages. In particular, I will highlight recent progress in NLP for African languages and present methods that are applicable to languages with limited data such as employing alternative sources of data and multi-modal information.