Independent Research Institute

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 Okalex launched — the first comprehensive English-Kwanyama digital dictionary and learning platform 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

ACL 2025 Outstanding Paper Award

Typology-Guided Adaptation in Multilingual Models

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

Ndapa Nakashole

Research in production

Tools built from our research, deployed for real users.

Okalex

Lexicography and Interactive Learning Platform

Okalex currently features an Okalai AI novel dataset, the first Kwanyama digital dictionary with nearly 12,000 entries, including translations, definitions, parts of speech, synonyms, and example sentences. Search in both English and Kwanyama, and discover featured entries.

For the learning aspect, Okalex includes interactive quizzes and flashcards for vocabulary practice, and a community commenting system so users can flag corrections. Built to scale beyond Kwanyama to other languages (forthcoming).

Visit Okalex →

Try it — search a word

0 Dictionary Entries
0 Translations
0 Synonyms

Who we are

Ndapa Nakashole

Founder & Research Lead

Associate Professor of Computer Science | University of California, San Diego