Digital archiving by Nigerian and foreign authors in a low resource context: A Content Analysis of publications on Natural Language Processing of Nigerian Languages

Abstract

This study investigated if there is a difference in the number of articles, datasets and computer codes that foreign and Nigerian authors of scientific publications on natural language processing (NLP) of Nigerian languages deposited in online digital archives. Relevant articles were systematically retrieved from Google, Web of Science and Scopus. Authorship type and data archiving information was extracted from the full text of the relevant publications. Result shows that papers with foreign authorship (80.4%) published their articles in non-commercial repositories, more than papers with Nigerian authorship (55.3%). Similarly, few papers with foreign authorship deposited research data (19.1%) and computer codes (10.4%), while none of the papers with Nigerian authorship did. It was recommended that librarians in Nigeria should create awareness on the benefits of digital archiving and open science.

Toluwase Asubiaro

Faculty of Information & Media Studies, Western University

Toluwase Asubiaro is a PhD candidate at the Western University’s LIS program. He holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Master of Information of Science. He started his career in Language Technology in 2012 as a volunteer research assistant in African Languages Technology Initiative (ALT-I), Ibadan, Nigeria. His major research interest is informetrics, natural language processing, information retrieval and automatic language identification. Prior to his present position in LiT.RL, he had contributed to studies on language technology for Yoruba, a Nigerian language.