Training AI 'to translate mum's phone messages' Bonaventure Dossou has been thinking a lot about how to improve phone conversations with his mother. She often sends him voice messages in Fon, a Beninese language, as he is away studying in Russia. He, however, does not understand some of the phrases she uses
Bonaventure Dossou
Bonaventure Dossou has been thinking a lot about how to improve phone conversations with his mother.
She often sends him voice messages in Fon, a Beninese language, as he is away studying in Russia. He, however, does not understand some of the phrases she uses.
"My mum cannot write Fon and I don't speak the language very well but I'm fluent in French," Mr Dossou told the BBC.
"I frequently ask my sister to help me understand some of the phrases mum uses," he said.
Improving his Fon through study is out of the question because like hundreds of other African languages, it is mostly spoken and rarely documented, so there are few, if any, books to teach the grammar and syntax.
Driven by curiosity and powered by data scraped from a Fon to French Jehovah Witness Bible, Mr Dossou and Chris Emezue, a Nigerian friend, developed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) language translation model, similar to Google Translate, which they have named FFR. It is still a work in progress.
The two students are among several AI researchers using African languages in Natural Language Processing (NLP), a branch of AI used to teach and help computers understand human languages.
Had the world not ground to a halt following the Covid-19 pandemic, Mr Dossou and Mr Emezue would have presented their creation to hundreds of participants at one of the world's biggest AI conferences, ICLR, in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, this week.
It would have been the first time the event was held in Africa.
Instead of cancelling the event the organisers decided to hold it virtually.
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