Independent research and development towards Kinyarwanda Language Technology
Mission
With an estimated population of over 15 million native speakers, Kinyarwanda, the national language of Rwanda, is one of the most spoken Bantu languages. Human language technology aims at developing technologies that facilitate human-machine interaction in a natural way. This requires computers to process human language either in written or spoken form. We have already seen a number of successful applications such as efficient search engines, spell and grammar checkers, translation software, chat bots, speech recognition and spoken dialog systems. However, most of the research effort and thus state-of-the-art systems have been tailored to the most economically and politically important languages. This leads to a technology gap between the technologically rich languages on one hand and the under-resourced languages on the other. This project aims at bridging this gap by developing tools, datasets, models and systems which will lay down the foundation of language technology applications for Kinyarwanda. With a growing number of technology users among Banyarwanda (Kinyarwanda speakers), we hope that the outcome of this project will not only enhance the user experience and create value, but will also make Kinyarwanda stay relevant in the AI era.