@inproceedings{leventhal-etal-2026-dealing,
    title = "Dealing with the Hard Facts of Low-Resource {A}frican {NLP}",
    author = "Leventhal, Michael  and
      Diarra, Yacouba  and
      Coulibaly, Nouhoum  and
      Kamat{\'e}, Panga Azazia  and
      Demb{\'e}l{\'e}, Aymane  and
      Tall, Madani Amadou  and
      Kone, Emmanuel Elise",
    editor = "Chimoto, Everlyn Asiko  and
      Lignos, Constantine  and
      Muhammad, Shamsuddeen  and
      Abdulmumin, Idris  and
      Siro, Clemencia  and
      Adelani, David Ifeoluwa",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on {A}frican Natural Language Processing ({A}frica{NLP} 2026)",
    month = mar,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Rabat, Morocco",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/manual-author-scripts/2026.africanlp-main.1/",
    pages = "1--10",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-364-7",
    abstract = "Creating speech datasets, models, and evaluation frameworks for low-resource languages remains challenging given the lack of a broad base of pertinent experience to draw from. This paper reports on the field collection of 612 hours of spontaneous speech in Bambara, a low-resource West African language; the semi-automated annotation of that dataset with transcriptions; the creation of several monolingual ultra-compact and small models using the dataset; and the automatic and human evaluation of their output. We offer practical suggestions for data collection protocols, annotation, and model design, as well as evidence for the importance of performing human evaluation. In addition to the main dataset, multiple evaluation datasets, models, and code are made publicly available."
}