Charles Nimo, Tobi Olatunji, Abraham Toluwase Owodunni, Tassallah Abdullahi, Emmanuel Ayodele, Mardhiyah Sanni, Ezinwanne C. Aka, Folafunmi Omofoye, Foutse Yuehgoh, Timothy Faniran, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Moshood O. Yekini, Jonas Kemp, Katherine A Heller, Jude Chidubem Omeke, Chidi Asuzu Md, Naome A Etori, Aïmérou Ndiaye, Ifeoma Okoh, Evans Doe Ocansey, Wendy Kinara, Michael L. Best, Irfan Essa, Stephen Edward Moore, Chris Fourie, Mercy Nyamewaa Asiedu. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Jessica Ojo, Israel Abebe Azime, Jian Yun Zhuang, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, Xuanli He, Millicent Ochieng, Sara Hooker, Andiswa Bukula, En-Shiun Annie Lee, Chiamaka Ijeoma Chukwuneke, Happy Buzaaba, Blessing Kudzaishe Sibanda, Godson Koffi Kalipe, Jonathan Mukiibi, Salomon Kabongo Kabenamualu, Foutse Yuehgoh, Mmasibidi Setaka, Lolwethu Ndolela, Nkiruka Odu, Rooweither Mabuya, Salomey Osei, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Sokhar Samb, Tadesse Kebede Guge, Tombekai Vangoni Sherman, Pontus Stenetorp. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

This paper provides guidance for building and maintaining infrastructure for participatory AI efforts by sharing reflections on building World Wide Dishes (WWD), a bottom-up, community-led image and text dataset of culinary dishes and associated cultural customs. We present WWD as an example of participatory dataset creation, where community members both guide the design of the research process and contribute to the crowdsourced dataset. This approach incorporates localised expertise and knowledge to address the limitations of web-scraped Internet datasets acknowledged in the Participatory AI discourse. We show that our approach can result in curated, high-quality data that supports decentralised contributions from communities that do not typically contribute to datasets due to a variety of systemic factors. Our project demonstrates the importance of participatory mediators in supporting community engagement by identifying the kinds of labour they performed to make WWD possible. We surface three dimensions of labour performed by participatory mediators that are crucial for participatory dataset construction: building trust with community members, making participation accessible, and contextualising community values to support meaningful data collection. Drawing on our findings, we put forth five lessons for building infrastructure to support future participatory AI efforts.

Jiayi Wang, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Sweta Agrawal, Marek Masiak, Ricardo Rei, Eleftheria Briakou, Marine Carpuat, Xuanli He, Sofia Bourhim, Andiswa Bukula, Muhidin Mohamed, Temitayo Olatoye, Tosin Adewumi, Hamam Mokayed, Christine Mwase, Wangui Kimotho, Foutse Yuehgoh, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Jessica Ojo, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Salomey Osei, Abdul-Hakeem Omotayo, Chiamaka Chukwuneke, Perez Ogayo, Oumaima Hourrane, Salma El Anigri, Lolwethu Ndolela, Thabiso Mangwana, Shafie Abdi Mohamed, Hassan Ayinde, Oluwabusayo Olufunke Awoyomi, Lama Alkhaled, Sana Al-azzawi, Naome A. Etori, Millicent Ochieng, Clemencia Siro, Njoroge Kiragu, Eric Muchiri, Wangari Kimotho, Lyse Naomi Wamba Momo, Daud Abolade, Simbiat Ajao, Iyanuoluwa Shode, Ricky Macharm, Ruqayya Nasir Iro, Saheed S. Abdullahi, Stephen E. Moore, Bernard Opoku, Zainab Akinjobi, Abeeb Afolabi, Nnaemeka Obiefuna, Onyekachi Raphael Ogbu, Sam Ochieng’, Verrah Akinyi Otiende, Chinedu Emmanuel Mbonu, Sakayo Toadoum Sari, Yao Lu, Pontus Stenetorp. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

The exponential increment in data size poses new challenges for computer scientists, giving rise to a new set of methodologies under the term Big Data. Many efficient algorithms for machine learning have been proposed, facing up time and memory requirements. Nevertheless, with hardware acceleration, multiple software instructions can be integrated and executed into a single hardware die. Current researches aim at eliminating the burden for the user in using multiple processor types. In this paper we propose our return of experience on a new way of implementing machine learning algorithms on heterogeneous hardware. To explore our vision, we use a parallel Mean-shift algorithm, developed at LIPN as our case study to investigate issues in building efficient Machine Learning libraries for heterogeneous systems. The ultimate goal is to provide a core set of building blocks for Machine Learning programming that could serve either to build new applications on heterogeneous architectures or to control the evolution of the underlying platform. We thus examine the difficulties encountered during the implementation of the algorithm with the aim to discover methodologies for building systems based on heterogeneous hardware. We also discover issues and building blocks for solving concrete machine learning (ML) problems on the Chisel software stack we use for this purpose.