- Published on
Tonative: Community-Driven Extension of African Datasets Through Human-AI Collaboration
- Authors
- Name
- Cynthia Amol
- X
- Name
- Sharon Ibejih
- X
Published at AI for African Languages Conference, PMLR, 2026 (Pages 33-36)
Abstract
The creation of language resources for African languages faces significant challenges related to sustainability. As a result, thousands of languages on the continent remain severely low-resource. Although community-led efforts have been impactful, they are expensive and less scalable. The use of synthetic data from large language models may be more scalable, but present the risks of introducing ‘translationese’ and amplifying existing biases. This paper presents the Tonative project, a human-AI collaborative framework designed to extend existing language datasets by translating them to more African languages. Our pipeline combines automated translation with community-based human validation, which reduces the manual review workload while ensuring the authenticity of translations. We applied this approach to increase language representation and dataset coverage. This work provides a foundation for more sustainable contributions to African NLP by leveraging existing resources and collaborating with native speakers.