@inproceedings{oduwole-etal-2026-africaption,
    title = "{A}fri{C}aption: Establishing a New Paradigm for Image Captioning in {A}frican Languages",
    author = "Oduwole, Mardiyyah  and
      Mireku, Prince  and
      Adebanjo, Fatimo  and
      Olajide, Oluwatosin  and
      Aliyu, Mahi Aminu  and
      Novikova, Jekaterina",
    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.5/",
    pages = "44--55",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-364-7",
    abstract = "Multimodal AI research has overwhelmingly focused on high-resource languages, hindering the democratization of advancements in the field. To address this, we present AfriCaption, a comprehensive framework for multilingual image captioning in 20 African languages and our contributions are threefold: (i) a curated dataset built on Flickr8k, featuring semantically aligned captions generated via a context-aware selection and translation process; (ii) a dynamic, context-preserving pipeline that ensures ongoing quality through model ensembling and adaptive substitution; and (iii) the AfriCaption model, a 0.5B parametervision-to-text architecture that integrates SigLIP and NLLB200 for caption generation across underrepresented languages. This unified framework ensures ongoing data quality and establishes the first scalable image-captioning resource for underrepresented African languages, laying the groundwork for truly inclusive multimodal AI."
}