@inproceedings{janssen-2026-advancing,
    title = "Advancing {A}frican {NLP}: {UDM}orph and flexi{P}ipe",
    author = "Janssen, Maarten",
    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.13/",
    pages = "142--148",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-364-7",
    abstract = "In this paper, we present some of our recent efforts to provide base NLP pipelines for African languages. These include an infrastructure called UDMorph to make UD-compatible training data available for resources that do not have dependency relations, and a Python package called flexiPipe to easily run an NLP pipeline in various NLP tools using a uniform front-end, including the models provided by UDMorph. flexiPipe also provides Unicode normalization, an often overlooked feature that has a significant impact on African NLP. flexiPipe currently provides an NLP pipeline for 33 African languages, a significant increase from the handful of models that are currently easily accessible. And UDMorph is designed to make it easy to provide training data for more languages."
}