8 July 2026 - 9 July 2026

SOAS GSMA Workshop: Exploring African language models

Key information

Date: 8 July 2026 to 9 July 2026
Time: 9:30 am to 6:00 pm
Venue: SOAS, Main Building
Room: Khalili Lecture Theatre (KLT)

About this event

There has been tremendous progress in the development of large language models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence (AI) applications over the last decades. However, the majority of work has focussed on a small number of well-described, mainly European languages. Yet in order to fully harness the advantages of the AI revolution, no language should be left behind – including African languages.

Africa is home to about 2,000 languages, ranging from major world languages like Swahili to many underdescribed community languages. In this workshop we explore aspects of LLM and AI for and based on African languages, bringing together AI researchers, linguists, translators, computer scientists and practitioners to exchange experiences and views for a mutually enriching dialogue, leading to a fuller understanding of the current state of the art, conceptual and practical challenges, and theoretical and methodological underpinnings of African languages and AI.

Organiser

This workshop is organised jointly by SOAS and GSMA, with event organisers including Dr Ida Hadjivayanis (SOAS), Prof Lutz Marten (SOAS), Louis Powell (GSMA) and Thomas Summers (SOAS).

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Workshop Programme

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SOAS GSMA Workshop: Exploring African language models

Key information

About this event

Organiser

Register for this event

Workshop Programme

Day 1 Open

09:00–09:30 | Tea and Coffee

09:30–09:40 | Opening

09:40–09:50 | Welcome

09:50–11:30 | Panel 1: Small Language Models (SLMs)

Building Language Technologies that Work: A Community-Centred Framework for African Language AI

Research on Balanced Corpus Construction and Deep Annotation of isiZulu for Robustness Enhancement of African Agglutinative Languages

Bridging the Language Gap in Text-to-SQL: Adapting LLMs for Chichewa in a Low-Resource Setting

Encoding Meaning Beyond Text: Fieldwork and Linguistic Challenges in Speech AI for Low-Resource Bantu Languages

11:30–11:45 | Tea Break

11:45–13:25 | Panel 2: Swahili and Large Language Models

Beyond Standard Swahili: AI Translation of Colloquial Swahili Varieties and Sheng

Whose Swahili is Modelled in AI? Data Sovereignty and Varietal Representation in Large Language Models

Swahili as a First-Class Language: A Swahili-Centered Framework for Correcting and Expanding AI Training Data in Kiswahili Sanifu

Interfacing Global AI with Multilingual Local Histories: Ethical Mediation and Kiswahili in the Mbotela Avatar

13:25–14:30 | Lunch

14:30–15:20 | Plenary Lecture

15:20–16:10 | Panel 3: Benchmarking

Benchmarking Guidelines for Swahili and Other African Languages

Benchmarking Misinformation for African Languages in the Age of LLMs: Problems, Principles, and a Path Forward

16:10–16:30 | Tea Break

16:30–17:45 | Panel 4: Language Learning

The Politics of Translation in African-Language Generative AI: Social Impacts and the Challenges for Critical Engagement, Education and Resistance

Harnessing Generative AI for Setswana Textbook Development: Pathways, Practices, and Challenges

Evaluating AI-Assisted Swahili Language Learning: Linguistic Accuracy and Student Perceptions at Mkwawa University College of Education (MUCE)

17:45 | Group Photo

19:00 | Conference Dinner

Day 2 Open

09:30–11:10 | Panel 5: Speech Technology

Bridging the Tonal Gap: A Neural Approach to Tonalization in Bambara for Speech Technologies

Yoruba OCR: A Diacritic-Sensitive Benchmark Revealing Failure Modes in Multimodal OCR

SƐBƐN!: Morphotactic-Guided Preference Alignment for Extremely Low-Resource Languages

TermLog: Filling the Gap in Terminologies and Registers for Robust African AI Models

11:10–11:30 | Tea Break

11:30–12:20 | Panel 6: Theoretical Reflections

African Languages and AI: Why Linguistics Needs Its Own Revolution

Multilingual Small Language Models as a Decolonized AI Framework for the Development of African Languages in South Africa

12:20–13:30 | Lunch

13:30–15:10 | Panel 7: Multilingualism

Measuring Practised Multilingualism in Africa Using Large Language Models: The Political Economy of Language Use, Language Ideology, and Language Policy

Beyond the National Standard: Multi-Dialectal NLP and the "No Dialect Left Behind" Framework for the Saaho Language

AfriSwitch: Evaluating and Adapting ASR for Natural African Code-Switched Conversations

No Formal Orthography, No Ground Truth: AI-Assisted Translation for Juba Arabic and the Case for Audio-First Approaches to Oral African Languages

15:10 | Closing Remarks

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