MasakhaNER 2.0: Africa-centric Transfer Learning for Named Entity
Recognition
David Ifeoluwa Adelani1,2,∗, Graham Neubig3, Sebastian Ruder4, Shruti Rijhwani3,
Michael Beukman5∗, Chester Palen-Michel6∗, Constantine Lignos6∗, Jesujoba O. Alabi1∗,
Shamsuddeen H. Muhammad7∗, Peter Nabende8∗, Cheikh M. Bamba Dione9∗, Andiswa Bukula10,
Rooweither Mabuya10 , Bonaventure F. P. Dossou11∗, Blessing Sibanda∗, Happy Buzaaba12∗,
Jonathan Mukiibi8∗, Godson Kalipe∗, Derguene Mbaye13∗, Amelia Taylor14∗, Fatoumata Kabore15∗,
Chris Chinenye Emezue16∗, Anuoluwapo Aremu∗, Perez Ogayo3∗, Catherine Gitau∗,
Edwin Munkoh-Buabeng17∗, Victoire M. Koagne∗, Allahsera Auguste Tapo18∗, Tebogo Macucwa19∗,
Vukosi Marivate19∗, Elvis Mboning∗, Tajuddeen Gwadabe∗, Tosin Adewumi20∗,
Orevaoghene Ahia21∗, Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende8∗, Neo L. Mokono19∗, Ignatius Ezeani22∗,
Chiamaka Chukwuneke22∗, Mofetoluwa Adeyemi23∗, Gilles Q. Hacheme24∗, Idris Abdulmumin25∗,
Odunayo Ogundepo23∗, Oreen Yousuf15∗, Tatiana Moteu Ngoli∗, Dietrich Klakow1
∗Masakhane NLP, 1Saarland University, Germany, 2University College London, UK, 3Carnegie Mellon University, USA,
4Google Research, 5University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, 6Brandeis University, USA, 7LIAAD-INESC TEC, Portugal,
8Makerere University, Uganda 9University of Bergen, Norway, 10SADiLaR, South Africa, 11 Mila Quebec AI Institute, Canada,
12RIKEN Center for AI Project, Japan, 13 Baamtu, Senegal, 14Malawi University of Business and Applied Science, Malawi,
15Uppsala University, Sweden, 16TU Munich, Germany, 17TU Clausthal, Germany, 18Rochester Institute of Technology, USA,
19University of Pretoria, South Africa, 20Luleå University of Technology, Sweden, 21University of Washington, USA,
22Lancaster University, UK, 23University of Waterloo, Canada, 24Ai4innov, France, 25Ahmadu Bello University, Nigeria.
Abstract
African languages are spoken by over a bil-
lion people, but are underrepresented in NLP
research and development. The challenges im-
peding progress include the limited availabil-
ity of annotated datasets, as well as a lack
of understanding of the settings where cur-
rent methods are effective. In this paper, we
make progress towards solutions for these chal-
lenges, focusing on the task of named en-
tity recognition (NER). We create the largest
human-annotated NER dataset for 20 African
languages, and we study the behavior of state-
of-the-art cross-lingual transfer methods in an
Africa-centric setting, demonstrating that the
choice of source language significantly affects
performance. We show that choosing the
best transfer language improves zero-shot F1
scores by an average of 14 points across 20
languages compared to using English. Our re-
sults highlight the need for benchmark datasets
and models that cover typologically-diverse
African languages.
1 Introduction
Many African languages are spoken by millions
or tens of millions of speakers. However, these
languages are poorly represented in NLP research,
and the development of NLP systems for African
languages is often limited by the lack of datasets
for training and evaluation (Adelani et al.,2021b).
Additionally, while there has been much re-
cent work in using zero-shot cross-lingual trans-
fer (Ponti et al.,2020;Pfeiffer et al.,2020;
Ebrahimi et al.,2022) to improve performance
on tasks for low-resource languages with multilin-
gual pretrained language models (PLMs) (Devlin
et al.,2019a;Conneau et al.,2020), the settings un-
der which contemporary transfer learning methods
work best are still unclear (Pruksachatkun et al.,
2020;Lauscher et al.,2020;Xia et al.,2020). For
example, several methods use English as the source
language because of the availability of training data
across many tasks (Hu et al.,2020;Ruder et al.,
2021), but there is evidence that English is often
not the best transfer language (Lin et al.,2019;
de Vries et al.,2022;Oladipo et al.,2022), and the
process of choosing the best source language to
transfer from remains an open question.
There has been recent progress in creating bench-
mark datasets for training and evaluating models
in African languages for several tasks such as ma-
chine translation (
∀
et al.,2020;Reid et al.,2021;
Adelani et al.,2021a,2022;Abdulmumin et al.,
2022), and sentiment analysis (Yimam et al.,2020;
Muhammad et al.,2022). In this paper, we focus on
the standard NLP task of named entity recognition
(NER) because of its utility in downstream applica-
tions such as question answering and information
arXiv:2210.12391v2 [cs.CL] 15 Nov 2022