# Create a NER tagger for African languages **URL:** \ **Category:** 🤗 Course Projects\ **Created:** [November 9, 2021, 7:28pm UTC](https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/create-a-ner-tagger-for-african-languages/11524 "2021-11-09T19:28:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![lewtun](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/hellohellohello/user_avatar/discuss.huggingface.co/lewtun/32/30995_2.png) [@lewtun](https://discuss.huggingface.co/u/lewtun)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2021, 7:28pm UTC](https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/create-a-ner-tagger-for-african-languages/11524/1 "2021-11-09T19:28:45Z")
> 👋 Please read the topic category [description](https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/about-the-course-projects-category/11510) to understand what this is all about ### Description Africa has over 2,000 spoken languages, but these languages are massively underrepresented in NLP research and datasets. The goal of this project is to train strong models for the MasakhaNER corpus, which is a high quality dataset for named entity recognition in 10 African languages. ### Model(s) There are a few popular multilingual models that you can start with: - [xlm-roberta-base](https://huggingface.co/xlm-roberta-base) - [bert-base-multilingual-uncased](https://huggingface.co/bert-base-multilingual-uncased) ### Datasets - [masakhaner](https://huggingface.co/datasets/masakhaner) ### Challenges It is unlikely that all ten languages in MasakhaNER are represented in multiingual models like XLM-R or mBERT, so some decisions will be need to be made on which subsets to focus on. ### Desired project outcomes - Create a Streamlit or Gradio app on [🤗 Spaces](https://huggingface.co/spaces) that can take text from one or more of the languages in MasakhaNER and extract the person names (PER), organizations (ORG), locations (LOC) and dates & time (DATE) tags. - Don’t forget to push all your models and datasets to the Hub so others can build on them! ### Additional resources - [MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African Languages](https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.11811) ### Discord channel To chat and organise with other people interested in this project, head over to our [Discord](http://xwo7x.mjt.lu/lnk/CAAAAkdkZwAAAAAAAAAAALG-MTEAAYCr4H8AAAAAAAyFyQBhjpnimM4rcE5DT5ibCUtRT96tWwAMh8Y/15/U6BYNMNDksyyGG4jgtzPKQ/aHR0cHM6Ly9odWdnaW5nZmFjZS5jby9qb2luL2Rpc2NvcmQ) and: - Follow the instructions on the `#join-course` channel - Join the `african-ner` channel Just make sure you comment here to indicate that you’ll be contributing to this project 🙂 ### Team organization on the Hub To join this team, make sure you join the following organisation on the Hub: - [team-african-ner (🤗 Course Team African NER)](https://huggingface.co/team-african-ner) ---
**Author:** ![seanbenhur](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/hellohellohello/user_avatar/discuss.huggingface.co/seanbenhur/32/20411_2.png) [@seanbenhur](https://discuss.huggingface.co/u/seanbenhur)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2021, 7:13am UTC](https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/create-a-ner-tagger-for-african-languages/11524/2 "2021-11-13T07:13:35Z")
I am interested in this project, don’t know African languages, but would be delighted to create something useful for the community, Count me in! ---
**Author:** ![lewtun](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/hellohellohello/user_avatar/discuss.huggingface.co/lewtun/32/30995_2.png) [@lewtun](https://discuss.huggingface.co/u/lewtun)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2021, 7:35pm UTC](https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/create-a-ner-tagger-for-african-languages/11524/3 "2021-11-13T19:35:02Z")
Great to hear that you’re interested in this project @seanbenhur! I’ve created a Discord channel (info in the topic description) in case you and others want to use it to coordinate 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![lewtun](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/hellohellohello/user_avatar/discuss.huggingface.co/lewtun/32/30995_2.png) [@lewtun](https://discuss.huggingface.co/u/lewtun)\ **Post date:** [November 14, 2021, 4:58pm UTC](https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/create-a-ner-tagger-for-african-languages/11524/4 "2021-11-14T16:58:37Z")
Hey @seanbenhur, I’ve created an organisation on the Hub for your team so that you can push your models there and deploy your Streamlit / Gradio application 🙂 See the topic description for the link (I’ve already send you an invite) ---
**Author:** ![seanbenhur](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/hellohellohello/user_avatar/discuss.huggingface.co/seanbenhur/32/20411_2.png) [@seanbenhur](https://discuss.huggingface.co/u/seanbenhur)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2021, 4:30am UTC](https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/create-a-ner-tagger-for-african-languages/11524/5 "2021-11-15T04:30:57Z")
Thank you!