Global Seminar in Kenya: Technology for African Languages in the Digital Age

Overview: Discover how to teach a computer to understand African languages and explore the current landscape of language technologies in Africa. This interdisciplinary seminar delves into the evolution of language technology over the past two decades, highlighting its focus on commercially dominant languages like English, Chinese and French, while emphasizing the need to expand into African languages for cultural and societal benefits.

Students will learn about the impact of language technology on daily life through examples such as smart devices and virtual agents. The seminar will explore how integrating African languages into digital technology promotes inclusivity, allowing these languages to thrive in digital orality and mainstream spaces previously dominated by major world languages. The course will also focus on the typology of African languages, with a special emphasis on Swahili, the lingua franca of Eastern and Central Africa. Students will gain insights into Swahili's grammatical and linguistic structure, understanding its growing importance in the global mediascape.

In the second phase, students will be introduced to natural language processing (NLP) concepts and tools, covering applications such as search engines, speech processing, text classification, machine translation, information extraction and recommendation systems. This segment aims to provide a comprehensive view of everyday applications and a basic understanding of the components driving these technologies.

The seminar will enroll local Kenyan students to collaborate with Princeton students, fostering a rich exchange of knowledge and culture. Students will work together on projects, collecting data on local African languages to create sustainable resource bases.

This course fulfills the Quantitative and Computational Reasoning (QCR) general education requirement, and counts towards minors in the Program in African Studies and the Program in Translation and Intercultural Studies, as well as the major and minor in linguistics. 

Faculty: Mahiri Mwita, Srinivas Bangalore, Happy Buzaaba

GLS 347/AFS 347/LIN 347/TRA 347