Introducing the African Languages WordNet

This paper introduces the African Languages WordNet project which was launched in Pretoria during March 2007. The construction of a WordNet for African Languages is discussed. Adding African languages to the WordNet web will enable many natural language processing (NLP) applications such as crosslinguistic information retrieval and question answering, and significantly aid machine translation. Some of the accomplishments of the WordNet workshop as well as the main challenges facing the development of Wordnets for African languages are examined. Finally we look at future challenges.