Students chapter

Who it is for

This section is for motivated high school and university students who want to contribute to EthioNLP. Pick the one that describes you on the join form.

Student member (high school)

School students in Ethiopia with an interest in computing, language or linguistics. No prior programming or research experience is expected.

A mentor who answers questions, and small, finishable tasks on real data. Work is chosen so that a first contribution takes weeks rather than months.

No programming or research experience expected. The starting point is usually annotation or data collection in a language the student speaks.

A named mentor
Guided first contributions, reviewed before anything is published
Listed in the directory once a first contribution is merged

Student member (bachelor)

Undergraduates at any Ethiopian university, and Ethiopian undergraduates studying abroad.

Supervision for a final-year project, a route into an existing dataset or model effort, and co-authorship where the contribution earns it under the community's authorship standards. Open thesis topics are listed on the mentorship page.

Final-year project supervision, or a defined piece of an existing dataset or model effort.

Supervision for a final-year project, and a named mentor
A route into an existing dataset or model effort
Co-authorship where the work earns it, on the same terms as anyone
Listed in the directory with a profile page

Why this chapter

What each group brings, and what the community gives back.

High school

Many school students have the aptitude for this work, and the tools have reached a point where they can take part in building language technology. They have time, they pick up new tools quickly, and between them they speak a far wider range of Ethiopian languages than the research community currently covers. The languages with no data are largely the languages no researcher happens to speak.

A grade 11 student in Hawassa is already working on question answering and on language technology for Sidama, and has offered to approach print, radio and television outlets to collect data for Sidama and other low-resource languages, and to introduce EthioNLP to school clubs. These are offers so far.

The community mentors, and students help build the datasets, benchmarks and collected text that languages with almost no resources need first.

Bachelor

Undergraduates have access to university computing infrastructure, some exposure to how research is conducted, and departments that already have supervision structures. They also still have time.

A final-year project is a natural unit of work here. It produces something the community can use and the student can publish.

What the chapter provides

3 of these are running now. The rest are planned and are marked as such.

A named mentor

Every student in the chapter is matched to a mentor who has agreed to take them. Mentors and their capacity are listed on the mentorship page.

Supervision for a final-year project

For bachelor students, co-supervision alongside a university supervisor, or sole supervision where the university allows it. Open topics are posted on the mentorship page.

Guided first contributions

Small, finishable pieces of real work: annotation, data collection, evaluation, documentation. Reviewed before anything is published.

Planned, not yet running

planned

Chapter seminar

An introductory session on what NLP for Ethiopian languages involves and how to start. Not yet scheduled; it will be listed on the events page once a date is set.

planned

Reading group

Reading one paper together with someone who can answer questions. Not yet running.

What is expected in return

Reply to your mentor. A mentorship lapses when one side stops replying.
Expect to read. Early work on a topic is usually reading.
Ask in the open. Questions in the group help the next person who has them.
Work you contribute is published under the community's licences, and co-authorship follows the same standards as for anyone else.