Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa with a population of more than 200 million people. More than 500 languages are spoken in Nigeria and it is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world. Despite this, natural language processing (NLP) research has mostly focused on the following four languages: Hausa, Igbo, Nigerian-Pidgin, and Yoruba (i.e <1% of the languages spoken in Nigeria). This is in part due to the unavailability of textual data in these languages to train and apply NLP algorithms. In this work, we introduce ibom -- a dataset for machine translation and topic classification in four Coastal Nigerian languages from the Akwa Ibom State region: Anaang, Efik, Ibibio, and Oro. These languages are not represented in Google Translate or in major benchmarks such as Flores-200 or SIB-200. We focus on extending Flores-200 benchmark to these languages, and further align the translated texts with topic labels based on SIB-200 classification dataset. Our evaluation shows that current LLMs perform poorly on machine translation for these languages in both zero-and-few shot settings. However, we find the few-shot samples to steadily improve topic classification with more shots.

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

Hydroxyurea (HU) has been shown to be effective in alleviating the symptoms of Sickle Cell Anemia disease. While Hydroxyurea reduces the complications associated with Sickle Cell Anemia in some patients, others do not benefit from this drug and experience deleterious effects since it is also a chemotherapeutic agent. Therefore, to whom, should the administration of HU be considered as a viable option, is the main question asked by the responsible physician. We address this question by developing modeling techniques that can predict a patient's response to HU and therefore spare the non-responsive patients from the unnecessary effects of HU on the values of 22 parameters that can be obtained from blood samples in 122 patients. Using this data, we developed Deep Artificial Neural Network models that can predict with 92.6% accuracy, the final HbF value of a subject after undergoing HU therapy. Our current studies are focussing on forecasting a patient's HbF response, 30 days ahead of time.