This work presents a standard Igbo named entity recognition (IgboNER) dataset as well as the results from training and fine-tuning state-of-the-art transformer IgboNER models. We discuss the process of our dataset creation - data collection and annotation and quality checking. We also present experimental processes involved in building an IgboBERT language model from scratch as well as fine-tuning it along with other non-Igbo pre-trained models for the downstream IgboNER task. Our results show that, although the IgboNER task benefited hugely from fine-tuning large transformer model, fine-tuning a transformer model built from scratch with comparatively little Igbo text data seems to yield quite decent results for the IgboNER task. This work will contribute immensely to IgboNLP in particular as well as the wider African and low-resource NLP efforts Keywords: Igbo, named entity recognition, BERT models, under-resourced, dataset

African languages are spoken by over a billion people, but they are under-represented in NLP research and development. Multiple challenges exist, including the limited availability of annotated training and evaluation datasets as well as the lack of understanding of which settings, languages, and recently proposed methods like cross-lingual transfer will be effective. In this paper, we aim to move towards solutions for these challenges, focusing on the task of named entity recognition (NER). We present the creation of the largest to-date human-annotated NER dataset for 20 African languages. We study the behaviour of state-of-the-art cross-lingual transfer methods in an Africa-centric setting, empirically demonstrating that the choice of source transfer language significantly affects performance. While much previous work defaults to using English as the source language, our results show that choosing the best transfer language improves zero-shot F1 scores by an average of 14% over 20 languages as compared to using English.

Abstract We take a step towards addressing the under- representation of the African continent in NLP research by bringing together different stakeholders to create the first large, publicly available, high-quality dataset for named entity recognition (NER) in ten African languages. We detail the characteristics of these languages to help researchers and practitioners better understand the challenges they pose for NER tasks. We analyze our datasets and conduct an extensive empirical evaluation of state- of-the-art methods across both supervised and transfer learning settings. Finally, we release the data, code, and models to inspire future research on African NLP.1