Language diversity in NLP is critical in enabling the development of tools for a wide range of users.
However, there are limited resources for building such tools for many languages, particularly those spoken in Africa.
For search, most existing datasets feature few or no African languages, directly impacting researchers' ability to build and improve information access capabilities in those languages.
Motivated by this, we created AfriCLIRMatrix, a test collection for cross-lingual information retrieval research in 15 diverse African languages.
In total, our dataset contains 6 million queries in English and 23 million relevance judgments automatically mined from Wikipedia inter-language links, covering many more African languages than any existing information retrieval test collection.
In addition, we release BM25, dense retrieval, and sparse--dense hybrid baselines to provide a starting point for the development of future systems.
We hope that these efforts can spur additional work in search for African languages.
AfriCLIRMatrix can be downloaded at https://github.com/castorini/africlirmatrix.

AfriCLIRMatrix: Enabling Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval for African Languages

**Topics:** Machine Translation 
NLP Applications 
Natural Language Generation 
Question Answering 
Resources and Evaluation 
Semantics: Lexical, Sentence level, Textual Inference and Other areas 
Speech, Vision, Robotics, Multimodal Grounding 
Summarization 
Theme Track 
Unsupervised and Weakly-Supervised Methods in NLP

Poster Session 16

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

 *Message from Noah A. Smith, University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Washington, USA* 
***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/9eec7d4a287ee18c278b08229290aa83.png)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OlPv6QBeo62VVTughj2jkiLeyHd1WnUt/view)
 
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/a3db7a768409f05192210d98601edb25.png)](https://emnlp2022.rocket.chat/)

To access this site you need to register. Please register [here](https://2022.emnlp.org/registration/).

Register here

EMNLP 2022

Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Xinyu Zhang

1

SHORT BIO

Presentations

AfriCLIRMatrix: Enabling Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval for African Languages

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES