A Systematic Review of NLP for Ghanaian Languages: Datasets, Models, and a Research Roadmap

Sheriff Issaka; Erick Rosas Gonzalez; Colene Agbo; Evans Kofi Agyei; Shruti Tyagi; John Emeka Eze; Enock Appiah Tieku; Junlin Fang; Thanh Do Nguyen; Juliet Arthur; Zhaoyi Zhang; Mihir Heda; Keyi Wang; Yinka Ajibola; Rebecca Akpanglo-Nartey; Frank Lawrence Nii Adoquaye Acquaye; Dennis Owusu; Jerry John Kponyo; Stephen Moore; Isaac Wiafe; Sean Du

arXiv · 2405.06818

A Systematic Review of NLP for Ghanaian Languages: Datasets, Models, and a Research Roadmap

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Abstract

Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Ghana's 73 living indigenous languages remains deeply fragmented, under-resourced, and heavily skewed toward a single language. We present the first systematic review of the Ghanaian NLP landscape, screening 17,000+ publications across four academic databases to critically synthesize 36 core studies spanning datasets, model architectures, and evaluation paradigms. Our analysis exposes a severe resource imbalance: Twi-centric NLP has grown modestly, driven largely by religious-text alignment and crowdsourcing, while the remaining 70+ languages remain almost entirely unaddressed, and dataset releases, model checkpoints, and evaluation practices remain inconsistent and rarely shared across the field. We translate these findings into a prioritized roadmap targeting Ghana's acute regional constraints, dialectal variation, non-standardized orthographies, and the absence of shared infrastructure, offering a replicable template for systematic review and research prioritization in other low-resource language settings.

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Sheriff Issaka, Erick Rosas Gonzalez, Colene Agbo, Evans Kofi Agyei, Shruti Tyagi, John Emeka Eze, Enock Appiah Tieku, Junlin Fang, Thanh Do Nguyen, Juliet Arthur, Zhaoyi Zhang, Mihir Heda, Keyi Wang, Yinka Ajibola, Rebecca Akpanglo-Nartey, Frank Lawrence Nii Adoquaye Acquaye, Dennis Owusu, Jerry John Kponyo, Stephen Moore, Isaac Wiafe, Sean Du. 2026-09-16. A Systematic Review of NLP for Ghanaian Languages: Datasets, Models, and a Research Roadmap. https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.06818

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