A lecturer at the Department of Mathematics at the University of Cape Coast, Dr Stephen Moore, has received a Google grant of $30,000 to continue his research in Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Dr Moore, also a co-founder of the Ghana Natural Language Processing (Ghana NLP), accelerates research in natural language processing (NLP) in low-resource languages in Ghana and Africa.
Natural Language Processing is a branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI) focused on how computers can process languages as humans do.
Since 2020, Dr Moore and his colleagues at Ghana NLP have been developing tools for text and speech translation of low-resource languages, including Twi, Dagbani, Ewe, Ga, Guruni, Igbo, etc.
At the re-opening of Google’s new office in Accra, Ghana, in 2022, Dr Moore presented the state-of-the-art NLP development in Ghana and the opportunities the country will gain by training and developing young people for the future.
He presented the first Ghanaian language translator, Khaya, launched by Ghana NLP and Algorine (a partner company of Ghana NLP).
The app uses state-of-the-art language models from NLP with the ambition to create a unified translator for several languages in Africa.
Google gave the gift in recognition of Ghana NLP’s efforts towards developing such important tools and training volunteers at Ghana NLP.
Ghana NLP is a social enterprise seeking to make NLP accessible to Ghanaians through training, workshops and seminars. It is the first of such awards Google has granted to any Ghanaian researcher.