Effects of Annotations' Density on Named Entity Recognition Models' Performance in the Context of African Languages

Abstract

African languages have recently been the subject of several studies in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and, this has caused a significant increase in their representation in the field. However, most studies tend to focus more on the models than the quality of the datasets when assessing the models’ performance in tasks such as Named Entity Recognition (NER). While this works well in most cases, it does not account for the limitations of doing NLP with low-resource languages, that is, the quality and the quantity of the dataset at our disposal. This paper provides an analysis of the performance of various models based on the quality of the dataset. We evaluate different pre-trained models with respect to the entity density per sentence of some African NER datasets. We hope with this study to improve the way NLP studies are done in the context of low-resourced languages.