About
Binary Tree Language Initiative is a nonprofit dedicated to the preservation of African languages.
This idea started with a small collaborative project between researchers at Masakhane, a pan-African NLP think tank, and a group of Wolof-speaking students in the Casamance region of Senegal. After working with those researchers to document the Wolof language and create a corpus for future Wolof-focused AI tools to be built, we realized documenting and preserving African languages in the age of AI was a daunting but important task.
Our team works with universities to raise awareness about the importance of preserving indigenous languages, researchers to document these languages for AI tools, and programmers to create Unicode proposals for rare African scripts.
Masakhane is still our cornerstone community partner, and you can check out the first meeting where it all started here: