CapeNLG research group

Research group based in Cape Town focused on natural language generation (NLG) for African languages, with a particular emphasis on low-resourced Southern African langauges.

Six Tuscan Poets, painting by Giorgio Vasari (1544)
Six Tuscan Poets, Giorgio Vasari (1544). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Focus areas

  • Natural language generation for low-resourced African languages
  • Controlled natural languages
  • Computational morphology, noun classification, and other tasks for African languages
  • Knowledge engineering and ontology verbalisation
  • Human evaluation of generated text

Members

Postgraduate students

  • Phuthang Makhupane (MSc. CS)
  • Tadiwa Magwenzi (MSc. CS)
  • Masixole Nkumbesi (MPhil. Inclusive Innovation)
  • Dennis Kiptanui Too (PhD. CS)
  • Atshilaho Nethathe (PhD. CS)
  • Daniel Holgate (Msc. CS)
  • Nana kwabena Opoku-Acheampong (Msc. AI)
  • Lindani Buthelezi (M.IT)

Hons students

  • Dylan Saayman, Connor Paton, Dean Sneddon

Scientific programmers and research assistants

  • Katlego Makhubedu
  • Génevieve Rachel Chikwanha

Alumni

  • Mandikudza Dangwa, Emma Van Der Berg, and Rector Ratsaka (Honours. 2025. On: Controlled Natural languages and models for research question authoring, scoring, and improvement)
  • Alexander van der Leek, Jonathan Mopp (Honours. 2024. On: Comparing the utility of morphosyntactical data vs. semantics for noun classification)
  • Liam Talberg and Adam Vere (Honours. 2023. On: Comparing pre-trained models to template-based methods for automatic question generation)
  • Danny Guttman and Mandisa Tunzi (Honours. 2023. On: Improving Text-Based Programming Error Messages For South African Students)
  • Amy Solomons and Junior Moraba (Honours. 2021. On: Digital Assistant for Financial Transactions)
  • Shannon Smith (Honours. 2020. On: Generating isiZulu text from Mathematical expressions)
  • Jarryd Dunn and Matthew Poulter (Honours. 2019. On: A comparison of end-to-end models and templates for generating text)

Publications

Work associated with CapeNLG members can be found on the publications page.