As the AI revolution transforms the digital world, millions of people on the African continent cannot tap its full promise because the languages they speak aren’t built into the large language models that drive services like ChatGPT. A Princeton postdoc and a new course he devised is focused on how to change that.

Happy Buzaaba’s research as a data engineer is centered on introducing more African languages into LLMs. There are over 7,000 languages in the world today, he said, and around 2,000 of these are spoken on the African continent. Yet not more than 20 African languages are currently represented in commercial LLMs, and there are efforts from both academia and industry to increase this number.

“People shouldn’t need to switch to another language for them to interact with technology,” Buzaaba said. “For these African 
communities, it’s not just about the lack of daily convenience. It’s also a barrier for them to enter and interact with the digital world.”

Buzaaba is also part of a grassroots organization called Masakhane, where he has been working since 2020 with scholars on various projects aimed at advancing African languages in LLMs.

He came to Princeton in fall 2023, hosted by the Center for Digital Humanities and the Princeton African Humanities Colloquium. He is also affiliated with the Africa World Initiative, a multifaceted University initiative to cultivate partnerships with wide-ranging impact in and beyond Africa.

This fall he brought his work into the classroom with a new Freshman Seminar, “Teaching Computers to Understand African Languages,” co-taught with Mahiri Mwita, a senior lecturer at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.

The new course focuses on the technical, ethical, and logistical issues and challenges around increasing the representation of African languages in LLMs, and on increasing access to the benefits of AI through smartphones and other devices.