Best Paper Award at DeepLearning Indaba 2025 | Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad

Our paper, “The State of Large Language Models for African Languages: Progress and Challenges”, has been awarded the Best Paper Award at Deep Learning Indaba (DLI)2025. DLI is the largest machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) gathering in Africa.

The paper reveals that African languages remain significantly underrepresented in current language models. Out of over 2,000 languages, only about 42 have any support in existing LLMs, primarily those with large speaker populations or official status. Major challenges include severe data scarcity, morphological complexity, a lack of standardized orthographies, and limited computational resources.