State of NLP in Kenya: A Survey

Understand

Kenya, known for its linguistic diversity, faces unique challenges and promising opportunities in advancing Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies, particularly for its underrepresented indigenous languages.

• This survey provides a detailed assessment of the current state of NLP in Kenya, emphasizing ongoing efforts in dataset creation, machine translation, sentiment analysis, and speech recognition for local dialects such as Kiswahili, Dholuo, Kikuyu, and Luhya.
• Despite these advancements, the development of NLP in Kenya remains constrained by limited resources and tools, resulting in the underrepresentation of most indigenous languages in digital spaces.
• This paper uncovers significant gaps by critically evaluating the available datasets and existing NLP models, most notably the need for large-scale language models and the insufficient digital representation of Indigenous languages.