AfroScope: A Framework for Studying the Linguistic Landscape of Africa

AfroScope is a newly introduced framework for Language Identification (LID) in Africa, featuring AfroScope-Data, a dataset encompassing 640 languages, and AfroScope-Models, a suite of advanced LID models. The framework employs a hierarchical classification method and introduces AfroScope-Mirror, a specialized embedding model that enhances disambiguation among closely related languages, achieving a macro-F1 improvement of 1.57 points on a confusable subset. This framework is significant for practitioners as it addresses the limitations in existing African LID systems, enabling more accurate and comprehensive language identification crucial for downstream NLP applications.