A State-of-the-Art Review of Nigerian Languages Natural Language Processing Research

Abstract

African languages, including those that are natives to Nigeria, are low-resource languages because they lack basic computing resources such as language-dependent hardware keyboard. Speakers of these low-resource languages are therefore unfairly deprived of information access on the internet. There is no information about the level of progress that has been made on the computation of Nigerian languages. Hence, this chapter presents a state-of-the-art review of Nigerian languages natural language processing. The review reveals that only four Nigerian languages; Hausa, Ibibio, Igbo, and Yoruba have been significantly studied in published NLP papers. Creating alternatives to hardware keyboard is one of the most popular research areas, and means such as automatic diacritics restoration, virtual keyboard, and optical character recognition have been explored. There was also an inclination towards speech and computational morphological analysis. Resource development and knowledge representation modeling of the languages using rapid resource development and cross-lingual methods are recommended.