🌍 Lark AI Community

Welcome to Lark, an open and collaborative AI community focused on building equitable, inclusive, and impactful Artificial Intelligence systems for Africa.

We are a research-driven, interdisciplinary initiative dedicated to solving local challenges across medicine, education, content creation, finance, and marketing, while also contributing cutting-edge models and datasets to the global AI ecosystem.

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🚀 Mission

Our mission is to advance African-centered AI by:

• Developing domain-specific foundation models and lightweight architectures for low-resource settings.
• Creating and curating clean, scalable, multilingual datasets relevant to African languages, cultures, and industries.
• Empowering researchers, developers, and organizations through open collaboration, training resources, and accessible tools.

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📦 Lark Model Series

The Lark Model Series is a family of models released in iterative versions, fine-tuned and pre-trained for applications in the African context.

Each model is accompanied by:

• 🧾 Model Cards
• 📊 Evaluation Benchmarks
• ⚖️ Responsible AI Documentation
• 💡 Inference & Fine-tuning Notebooks

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📚 Datasets

Lark is committed to the ethical acquisition and distribution of high-quality datasets. Our data pipeline includes:

• Data Sourcing: Web scrapes, public records, multilingual corpora, domain-specific archives, with regional legal clearance
• Cleaning & Filtering: Deduplication, de-identification (PII removal), language detection, quality scoring
• Annotation: Manual + semi-automated labeling workflows using Label Studio, Prodigy, and Hugging Face Datasets

We follow the Data Nutrition Labels and Open Data Commons licensing principles.

Current Releases

• lark-med-corpus: A multilingual medical dataset for clinical NLP (Swahili, Yoruba, Amharic, Hausa)
• lark-edu-textbooks: African education corpora (K–12 curriculum, localized pedagogy)
• lark-financial-news: Economic and financial news data scraped from African business publications

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🧠 Research Focus Areas

We are actively researching:

• Multilingual NLP for underrepresented African languages
• Domain-specific model pretraining (e.g., biomedical, financial LMs)
• Few-shot and low-resource adaptation
• Multimodal learning (text + images + voice)
• Responsible and explainable AI tailored to African legal/ethical frameworks

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🤝 How to Contribute

We welcome contributions across domains — research, data, engineering, documentation, or advocacy.

Get Started

1. Join the Community
   • Hugging Face: Lark Community
   • Discord/Slack (link placeholder)
2. Explore Open Issues
   • Models: issues/models
   • Datasets: issues/datasets
3. Contribute Code or Data
   • Fork → Create Branch → PR
   • Add your name to CONTRIBUTORS.md

Guidelines

• Follow our Contribution Guidelines
• Review Ethical AI & Data Use Policy
• Read Model Documentation Standards

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🌐 Partners & Supporters

We collaborate with:

• African research labs and universities
• NGOs and health organizations
• EdTech platforms
• FinTech and civic tech startups
• Global open-source communities

If you’re an organization interested in partnering, supporting, or funding Lark, please contact us.

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📅 Roadmap

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📄 License

All models and datasets are licensed under:

• Models: Apache 2.0 License
• Datasets: ODC-BY or CC BY 4.0 depending on source

Please check individual model cards or dataset pages for more.

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✨ Acknowledgments

We thank the growing Lark community — researchers, students, contributors, and institutions — for your trust and energy. This is just the beginning of building AI by Africa, for Africa.

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📫 Contact Us: larkai@protonmail.com
🐦 Twitter/X: @LarkAI_Africa (placeholder)
🧪 Hugging Face Hub: https://huggingface.co/Lark