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        🛰️ May the 4th Be With You!  “In a research lab not so far away…”

While Jedi Masters battled Sith Lords in the stars, our DSFSI researchers were hard at work confronting the dark side of data scarcity, language bias, and limited compute across the African continent. Today, we celebrate the Force of responsible AI through five powerful papers from the DSFSI alliance:

1️⃣ Political Sentiment in the Twitter System (JeDEM Journal) The Election Strikes Back Penelope Matloga, Vukosi Marivate, and Kayode Olaleye analyzed political sentiment on X (Twitter) during South Africa’s 2021 local government elections. Using RoBERTa, VADER, and GPT-3.5, they revealed public sentiments toward the ANC and detected bot activities.

📖 Read: https://lnkd.in/dnv-auTv 🎧 Listen: https://lnkd.in/dQ_Hkh2M

2️⃣ Translation with the Force of Prompts (Machine Learning with Applications) The Prompt Awakens Pitso Khoboko, Vukosi Marivate, and Joseph Sefara fine-tuned Mistral 7B to translate English into isiZulu and isiXhosa. Through prompt engineering and QLoRA, they achieved impressive results with minimal computational resources.

📖 Read: https://lnkd.in/eCU5XrCm 🎧 Listen: https://lnkd.in/eq4hDRuq

3️⃣ QA for Farmers on the Outer Rim (Applied AI Letters) The Agrarian Jedi Council Fiskani Banda, Vukosi Marivate, and Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende developed a multilingual question-answering system for smallholder farmers, utilizing Pula Imvula farming articles and few-shot learning techniques. 📖 Read: https://lnkd.in/d-Gv-rKM 🎧 Listen: https://lnkd.in/d2BkvZ-N

4️⃣ Summarizing the Jedi Archives: ZASCA-Sum (Data in Brief) The Republic’s Legal Records, Now Machine-Readable Idris Abdulmumin and Vukosi Marivate introduced ZASCA-Sum, a dataset of over 4,000 South African Supreme Court of Appeal judgments and media summaries, facilitating legal summarization research.

📖 Read: https://lnkd.in/ddT6YWnF 📂 Data: https://lnkd.in/dppQ8rBf

💫 A Galactic Alliance of Acknowledgements These victories were made possible by the unwavering support of: Absa Group Chair of Data Science OpenAI (research compute credits) SADiLaR, GRAIN SA/GRAAN SA FCDO and IDRC (AI4D) Legal guidance from Dr. Chijioke Okorie, PhD Okorie (Data Science Law Lab)

⚔️ This is the way. As we build a future where African languages and legal systems are well represented in the digital world, we salute the researchers carrying the light of innovation. May the Data be with you. — The DSFSI Alliance