The Faculty of Science, Agriculture, and Engineering, through its Department of Computer Science recently launched the Telkom-National Research Foundation (NRF) Future Technologies Programme Project at the newly constructed Engineering Building on the Richards Bay campus.
The primary objective of this gathering was to bring together leading institutions, including the University of Fort Hare, the University of Limpopo and the University of Cape Town and recognise the need for increased attention to ‘low-resource’ languages such as isiZulu, isiXhosa, and Sepedi, which often receive less focus in natural language processing (NLP) research compared to high-resource languages like English, French, and Chinese.
It was mentioned in this event that this programme further aims to explore how Large Language Models can be adapted for these languages, focusing on challenges such as data scarcity and community involvement.
