Applied AI Research

Building AI for every language.

We research and build language technology where today's LLMs fall short, the thousands of languages left behind by state-of-the-art AI.

Okalai AI
Mar 2026 African language reference and learning platform for Bantu languages Visit →
Feb 2026 Paper on Kwanyama LLMs (1B, 3B, 8B) accepted at LREC 2026
Jul 2025 Outstanding Paper Award at ACL 2025 for typology-guided multilingual adaptation PDF →

Publications

Our work spans multilingual LLMs, typological adaptation, and low-resource NLP.

LREC 2026

Sentiment Analysis and Language Models for Kwanyama

1B, 3B, and 8B parameter LLMs for Kwanyama, the first large language models for Kwanyama of this scale.

Ndapa Nakashole

@inproceedings{nakashole2026kwanyama,
  title={Sentiment Analysis and Language Models for Kwanyama},
  author={Nakashole, Ndapa},
  booktitle={Proceedings of LREC},
  year={2026}
}
ACL 2025 Outstanding Paper Award

Typology-Guided Adaptation in Multilingual Models

Leveraging linguistic typology to improve cross-lingual transfer in multilingual models.

Ndapa Nakashole

@inproceedings{nakashole2025typology,
  title={Typology-Guided Adaptation in Multilingual Models},
  author={Nakashole, Ndapa},
  booktitle={Proceedings of ACL},
  year={2025}
}
All publications →

Research in production

From the first family of Kwanyama LLMs to interactive language tools, our research, deployed for real users.

OkaLM

Kwanyama Language Models

OkaLM is the first family of publicly available large language models for Kwanyama. Available in three sizes (1B, 3B, 8B parameters) to suit different use cases, from lightweight applications to more capable generation.

View on Hugging Face →

Try it — generate Kwanyama text with OkaLM-8B

3 Model Sizes
1B–8B Parameters

OkaLex

African Language Reference and Learning Platform

OkaLex is a language reference and interactive learning platform for Bantu languages. It currently features bilingual dictionaries for six languages: Kwanyama, Ndonga, Umbundu, Sukuma, Xhosa, and Zulu — each with translations, definitions, parts of speech, and example sentences.

Each language includes interactive quizzes, flashcards, and a word-matching game for vocabulary practice. The language learning aspect is most developed for Kwanyama, with nearly 50 grammar modules.

For schools, linguists, and anyone exploring Bantu languages.

Visit OkaLex →

Try it — search a word

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