ML Anthology

The African Stopwords Project: Curating Stopwords for African Languages

Chris Chinenye Emezue, Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Cynthia Thinwa, Helper Zhou, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Lerato Louis, Idris Abdulmumin, Samuel Gbenga Oyerinde, Benjamin Ayoade Ajibade, Olanrewaju Samuel, Emeka Felix Onwuegbuzia, Handel Chiagozie Emezue, Ifeoluwatayo Adeseye Ige, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Chiamaka Ijeoma Chukwuneke, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Naome A Etori, Chinedu Emmanuel Mbonu, Oreen Yousuf, Kaosarat Boluwatife Aina, Davis David
ICLRW 2022
/iclrw/2022/emezue2022iclrw-african/

Abstract

Stopwords are fundamental in Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for information retrieval. One of the common tasks in preprocessing of text data is the removal of stopwords. Currently, while high-resource languages like English benefit from the availability of several stopwords, low-resource languages, such as those found in the African continent, have none that are standardized and available to use in NLP packages. Stopwords in the context of African languages are understudied and can reveal information about the crossover between languages. The African Stopwords project aims to study and curate stopwords for African languages. In this paper, we present our current progress on ten African languages as well as future plans for the project.

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Cite

Text

Emezue et al. "The African Stopwords Project: Curating Stopwords for African Languages." ICLR 2022 Workshops: AfricaNLP, 2022.

Markdown

[Emezue et al. "The African Stopwords Project: Curating Stopwords for African Languages." ICLR 2022 Workshops: AfricaNLP, 2022.](https://mlanthology.org/iclrw/2022/emezue2022iclrw-african/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{emezue2022iclrw-african,
  title     = {{The African Stopwords Project: Curating Stopwords for African Languages}},
  author    = {Emezue, Chris Chinenye and Nigatu, Hellina Hailu and Thinwa, Cynthia and Zhou, Helper and Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan and Louis, Lerato and Abdulmumin, Idris and Oyerinde, Samuel Gbenga and Ajibade, Benjamin Ayoade and Samuel, Olanrewaju and Onwuegbuzia, Emeka Felix and Emezue, Handel Chiagozie and Ige, Ifeoluwatayo Adeseye and Tonja, Atnafu Lambebo and Chukwuneke, Chiamaka Ijeoma and Dossou, Bonaventure F. P. and Etori, Naome A and Mbonu, Chinedu Emmanuel and Yousuf, Oreen and Aina, Kaosarat Boluwatife and David, Davis},
  booktitle = {ICLR 2022 Workshops: AfricaNLP},
  year      = {2022},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/iclrw/2022/emezue2022iclrw-african/}
}