Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi

Measuring Research Progress and Linguistic Inclusion in Low-Resource Languages

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi +6

Large Language Models (LLMs) have accelerated research on low-resource and multilingual NLP, but their effectiveness in creating an equitable landscape remains unmapped. We analyze…

AfriGuard: Safety and Robust Refusal For African Languages

Israel Abebe Azime, Jesujoba O. Alabi, Iffat Maab +20

Large language models (LLMs) designed to interact with users are typically trained to respond appropriately to harmful or toxic content. However, ensuring appropriate responses bec…

Cultivar: A Contrastive and Locale-Oriented Translation Benchmark for Investigating Contamination and Localisation Robustness

Pinzhen Chen, Koel Dutta Chowdhury, Xiaoya Xu +20

Multilingual translation benchmarks are typically sourced in English and translated into other languages, treating language pairs as the unit of evaluation---a design that is prone…

From Monolingual to Multilingual: Evaluating Mamba for ASR in South African Languages

Jesujoba O. Alabi, Julian Herreilers, Badr M. Abdullah +1

Recent advances in automatic speech recognition (ASR) have explored different sequence models, including Conformer-based models and newer state space models such as Mamba. Although…

A Mechanistic Understanding of Pronoun Fidelity in LLMs

Katharina Trinley, Jesujoba O. Alabi, Dietrich Klakow +1

Faithful and robust pronoun use is important for fair and coherent generations, yet large language models largely fail when multiple referents use different pronouns. To study the…

OpenBibleTTS: Large-Scale Speech Resources and TTS Models for Low-Resource Languages

David Guzmán, Luel Hagos Beyene, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi +3

Recent advances in neural text-to-speech (TTS) and multilingual speech generation have substantially improved synthetic speech quality, yet these gains remain unevenly distributed…

AfrIFact: Cultural Information Retrieval, Evidence Extraction and Fact Checking for African Languages

Israel Abebe Azime, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, Crystina Zhang +16

Assessing the veracity of a claim made online is a complex and important task with real-world implications. When these claims are directed at communities with limited access to inf…

Saar-Voice: A Multi-Speaker Saarbrücken Dialect Speech Corpus

Lena S. Oberkircher, Jesujoba O. Alabi, Dietrich Klakow +1

Natural language processing (NLP) and speech technologies have made significant progress in recent years; however, they remain largely focused on standardized language varieties. D…

YoNER: A New Yorùbá Multi-domain Named Entity Recognition Dataset

Peace Busola Falola, Jesujoba O. Alabi, Solomon O. Akinola +3

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a foundational NLP task, yet research in Yorùbá has been constrained by limited and domain-specific resources. Existing resources, such as Masakha…

Ethio-ASR: Joint Multilingual Speech Recognition and Language Identification for Ethiopian Languages

Badr M. Abdullah, Israel Abebe Azime, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja +14

We present Ethio-ASR, a suite of multilingual CTC-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) models jointly trained on five Ethiopian languages: Amharic, Tigrinya, Oromo, Sidaama, an…

Afri-MCQA: Multimodal Cultural Question Answering for African Languages

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Srija Anand, Emilio Villa-Cueva +16

Africa is home to over one-third of the world's languages, yet remains underrepresented in AI research. We introduce Afri-MCQA, the first Multilingual Cultural Question-Answering b…

CommonLID: Re-evaluating State-of-the-Art Language Identification Performance on Web Data

Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Laurie Burchell, Catherine Arnett +94

Language identification (LID) is a fundamental step in curating multilingual corpora. However, LID models still perform poorly for many languages, especially on the noisy and heter…

TRepLiNa: Layer-wise CKA+REPINA Alignment Improves Low-Resource Machine Translation in Aya-23 8B

Toshiki Nakai, Ravi Kiran Chikkala, Lena Sophie Oberkircher +4

The 2025 Multimodal Models for Low-Resource Contexts and Social Impact (MMLoSo) Language Challenge addresses one of India's most pressing linguistic gaps: the lack of resources for…

MERLIN: Multi-Stage Curriculum Alignment for Multilingual Encoder-LLM Integration in Cross-Lingual Reasoning

Kosei Uemura, David Guzmán, Quang Phuoc Nguyen +3

Large language models excel in English but still struggle with complex reasoning in many low-resource languages (LRLs). Existing encoder-plus-decoder methods such as LangBridge and…

mSTEB: Massively Multilingual Evaluation of LLMs on Speech and Text Tasks

Luel Hagos Beyene, Vivek Verma, Min Ma +4

Large Language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on a wide range of tasks, including in multimodal settings such as speech. However, their evaluation is often…

Charting the Landscape of African NLP: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Ahead

Jesujoba O. Alabi, Michael A. Hedderich, David Ifeoluwa Adelani +1

With over 2,000 languages and potentially millions of speakers, Africa represents one of the richest linguistic regions in the world. Yet, this diversity is scarcely reflected in s…

INJONGO: A Multicultural Intent Detection and Slot-filling Dataset for 16 African Languages

Hao Yu, Jesujoba O. Alabi, Andiswa Bukula +19

Slot-filling and intent detection are well-established tasks in Conversational AI. However, current large-scale benchmarks for these tasks often exclude evaluations of low-resource…

AFRIDOC-MT: Document-level MT Corpus for African Languages

Jesujoba O. Alabi, Israel Abebe Azime, Miaoran Zhang +13

This paper introduces AFRIDOC-MT, a document-level multi-parallel translation dataset covering English and five African languages: Amharic, Hausa, Swahili, Yorùbá, and Zulu. The da…

YAD: Leveraging T5 for Improved Automatic Diacritization of Yorùbá Text

Akindele Michael Olawole, Jesujoba O. Alabi, Aderonke Busayo Sakpere +1

In this work, we present Yorùbá automatic diacritization (YAD) benchmark dataset for evaluating Yorùbá diacritization systems. In addition, we pre-train text-to-text transformer, T…

Uhura: A Benchmark for Evaluating Scientific Question Answering and Truthfulness in Low-Resource African Languages

Edward Bayes, Israel Abebe Azime, Jesujoba O. Alabi +11

Evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) on knowledge-intensive tasks and factual accuracy often focus on high-resource languages primarily because datasets for low-resource lan…

AfriHuBERT: A self-supervised speech representation model for African languages

Jesujoba O. Alabi, Xuechen Liu, Dietrich Klakow +1

In this work, we present AfriHuBERT, an extension of mHuBERT-147, a compact self-supervised learning (SSL) model pretrained on 147 languages. While mHuBERT-147 covered 16 African l…

cs.CL2024★ 3 cited

IrokoBench: A New Benchmark for African Languages in the Age of Large Language Models

David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Jessica Ojo, Israel Abebe Azime +24

Despite the widespread adoption of Large language models (LLMs), their remarkable capabilities remain limited to a few high-resource languages. Additionally, many low-resource lang…

EkoHate: Abusive Language and Hate Speech Detection for Code-switched Political Discussions on Nigerian Twitter

Comfort Eseohen Ilevbare, Jesujoba O. Alabi, David Ifeoluwa Adelani +3

Nigerians have a notable online presence and actively discuss political and topical matters. This was particularly evident throughout the 2023 general election, where Twitter was u…