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SUMMARY:Global Seminar in Kenya: Technology for African Languages in the D
 igital Age
DTSTART:20250601T180700Z
DTEND:20250712T180700Z
UID:https://cdh.princeton.edu/events/2025/06/global-seminar-in-kenya-techn
 ology-for-african-languages-in-the-digital-age/
DESCRIPTION:\n\n  Overview: Discover how to teach a computer to understand
  African languages and explore the current landscape of language technolog
 ies 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 so
 cietal benefits.Students will learn about the impact of language technolog
 y on daily life through examples such as smart devices and virtual agents.
  The seminar will explore how integrating African languages into digital t
 echnology promotes inclusivity\, allowing these languages to thrive in dig
 ital orality and mainstream spaces previously dominated by major world lan
 guages. The course will also focus on the typology of African languages\, 
 with a special emphasis on Swahili\, the lingua franca of Eastern and Cent
 ral Africa. Students will gain insights into Swahili&#x27\;s grammatical a
 nd linguistic structure\, understanding its growing importance in the glob
 al 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 tra
 nslation\, 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 wi
 ll enroll local Kenyan students to collaborate with Princeton students\, f
 ostering a rich exchange of knowledge and culture. Students will work toge
 ther on projects\, collecting data on local African languages to create su
 stainable resource bases.This course fulfills the Quantitative and Computa
 tional Reasoning (QCR) general education requirement\, and counts towards 
 minors in the Program in African Studies and the Program in Translation an
 d Intercultural Studies\, as well as the major and minor in linguistics. 
 Faculty: Mahiri Mwita\, Srinivas Bangalore\, Happy BuzaabaGLS 347/AFS 347/
 LIN 347/TRA 347\n\n\nhttps://cdh.princeton.edu/events/2025/06/global-semin
 ar-in-kenya-technology-for-african-languages-in-the-digital-age/
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