Overview South Africa is a multicultural society that is characterised by its rich linguistic diversity. Language is an indispensable tool that can be used to deepen democracy and also contribute to the social, cultural, intellectual, economic and political life of the South African society.
The country is multilingual with 11 official languages, each of which is guaranteed equal status. Most South Africans are multilingual and able to speak at least two or more of the official languages.
The goals of this hackathon was to:
Build a machine learning model that can accurately classify text into one of the 11 official languages of South Africa. Learn about the challenges of natural language processing (NLP) in a multilingual setting. Gain experience in using machine learning to solve real-world problems.