NLP and Some Research Results in Senegal

This chapter is an attempt to popularize science. It relies heavily on the INRIA seminar https://fidle.cnrs.fr/w3/ . Its objectives are on one hand to present NLP to PhD students and other researchers and on the other hand to take stock of the research done in Senegal in the field of NLP. We first introduce the basic definitions and concepts of NLP such as bags of words, TF-IDF, etc., before presenting new products such as LLMs and multimodal models. Finally, we have published publications obtained over the past five years by our research group in the field of NLP, PhDs, and master’s thesis defended (Kandé et al., icetas.etssm.org; Kandé et al., FWLSA-score: French and Wolof lexicon-based for sentiment analysis, 2019; Kandé et al., Vector space model of text classification based on inertia contribution of document, 2019; Kandé et al., A novel term weighting scheme model, 2018; Kandji and Ndiaye, Design and realization of an NLP application for the massive processing of large volumes of resumes, 2022; Samb et al., Improved bilingual sentiment analysis lexicon using word-level trigram, 2019).