Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, Israel Abebe Azime, Miaoran Zhang, Cristina España-Bonet, Rachel Bawden, Dawei Zhu, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Clement Oyeleke Odoje, Idris Akinade, Iffat Maab, Davis David, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Neo Putini, David O. Ademuyiwa, Andrew Caines, Dietrich Klakow. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2025.

Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Idris Abdulmumin, Abinew Ayele, Nedjma Ousidhoum, David Adelani, Seid Yimam, Ibrahim Ahmad, Meriem Beloucif, Saif Mohammad, Sebastian Ruder, Oumaima Hourrane, Alipio Jorge, Pavel Brazdil, Felermino Ali, Davis David, Salomey Osei, Bello Shehu-Bello, Falalu Lawan, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Samuel Rutunda, Tadesse Belay, Wendimu Messelle, Hailu Balcha, Sisay Chala, Hagos Gebremichael, Bernard Opoku, Stephen Arthur. Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2023.

David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Marek Masiak, Israel Abebe Azime, Jesujoba Alabi, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Christine Mwase, Odunayo Ogundepo, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Akintunde Oladipo, Doreen Nixdorf, Chris Chinenye Emezue, Sana Al-azzawi, Blessing Sibanda, Davis David, Lolwethu Ndolela, Jonathan Mukiibi, Tunde Ajayi, Tatiana Moteu, Brian Odhiambo, Abraham Owodunni, Nnaemeka Obiefuna, Muhidin Mohamed, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Teshome Mulugeta Ababu, Saheed Abdullahi Salahudeen, Mesay Gemeda Yigezu, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Idris Abdulmumin, Mahlet Taye, Oluwabusayo Awoyomi, Iyanuoluwa Shode, Tolulope Adelani, Habiba Abdulganiyu, Abdul-Hakeem Omotayo, Adetola Adeeko, Abeeb Afolabi, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Olanrewaju Samuel, Clemencia Siro, Wangari Kimotho, Onyekachi Ogbu, Chinedu Mbonu, Chiamaka Chukwuneke, Samuel Fanijo, Jessica Ojo, Oyinkansola Awosan, Tadesse Kebede, Toadoum Sari Sakayo, Pamela Nyatsine, Freedmore Sidume, Oreen Yousuf, Mardiyyah Oduwole, Kanda Tshinu, Ussen Kimanuka, Thina Diko, Siyanda Nxakama, Sinodos Nigusse, Abdulmejid Johar, Shafie Mohamed, Fuad Mire Hassan, Moges Ahmed Mehamed, Evrard Ngabire, Jules Jules, Ivan Ssenkungu, Pontus Stenetorp. Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2023.

Abstract We take a step towards addressing the under- representation of the African continent in NLP research by bringing together different stakeholders to create the first large, publicly available, high-quality dataset for named entity recognition (NER) in ten African languages. We detail the characteristics of these languages to help researchers and practitioners better understand the challenges they pose for NER tasks. We analyze our datasets and conduct an extensive empirical evaluation of state- of-the-art methods across both supervised and transfer learning settings. Finally, we release the data, code, and models to inspire future research on African NLP.1