AfriQA: Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering for African Languages vs AfriSenti: A Twitter Sentiment Analysis Benchmark for African Languages

AfriQA is the first cross-lingual open-retrieval question answering benchmark for African languages, with more than 12,000 XOR-QA examples across 10 African languages. The paper shows that current automatic translation and multilingual retrieval methods perform poorly for these languages, where in-language digital content is scarce.

AfriSenti is a sentiment analysis benchmark of more than 110,000 tweets in 14 African languages spanning four language families, annotated by native speakers. It underpinned SemEval-2023 Task 12, a shared task that attracted more than 200 participants, and documents data collection, annotation and baseline methods for low-resource languages.