Advancing Chichewa IR

Malawi is home to over ten local languages, including Chichewa, yet many of these languages lack both printed and digital resources. Consequentially, access to information in these languages is limited, and this hinders knowledge sharing, which may potentially impact socio-economic development. In this paper, we discuss our work on developing language resources and tools for Chichewa. We begin by providing an overview of the Chichewa language, and highlight its inherent complexities that require new approaches to informa tion retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP). We then present our past, current, and ongoing research and conclude with future directions. Our goal is to engage with the IR community to discuss how we can advance IR for low resource languages (LRLs) like Chichewa.