Open Vacancy: NLP Developer- Consultant

About LDRI

The Local Development Research Institute (LDRI) an action-oriented non-profit think tank supporting African countries in their efforts to take practical, evidence-informed actions to end extreme poverty, end hunger, and reduce inequalities. We build the capacity of governments and other stakeholders across Sub-Saharan Africa to use data and evidence for better socio-economic development outcomes.

Project Overview

LDRI has been developing an AI early warning system for smallholder agriculture and we would like to enhance the system by developing and integrating state-of-the-art Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) models for three local languages – Kiswahili, Kiembu, and Kikuyu. 

Terms of Reference

• Scope of Work

1. Prepare the collected voice data, transcriptions, and translations for NLP modelling. Identify data gaps and propose augmentation strategies.
2. Advise the data annotation team, improve our data annotation training guidelines and the labelled datasets. 
3. Evaluate ASR frameworks for low-resource languages, fine-tune/train and optimize models using the provided data.
4. Develop models to accurately determine intent based on transcribed and translated inputs.
5.  Develop a conversational workflow to handle interactions and maintain conversational context.
6. Work with our back-end developer to integrate and ensure seamless processes with the existing EWS system.
7. Conduct quality and accuracy tests to enhance the increase the performance of the models
8. Provide detailed documentation of the models development and training and testing performance and iterations from feedback obtained during a pilot deployment.

Required Qualifications & Experience

• Demonstrable experience in building and deploying ASR and NLP models, particularly for low-resource languages.
• Strong background in Python, with experience in Machine Learning frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
•  Experience with building conversational AI including dialogue management systems and context-aware NLP models.
• Effective time management and clear communication skills to meet project deadlines and milestones.

Estimated Project Timeline – 8 weeks 

How To Apply 

If interested, please fill out the job application form here before 17th March 2025.