5 citations · 20 across the 28 of their papers we have counts for
31 papers
The Illusion of Cross-Lingual Safety in Low-Resource Languages
Abigail Oppong, P Sam Sahil, Tadesse Destaw Belay +12
Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs) is largely developed in English, assuming these safeguards generalize across multilingual settings. However, this assumption remain…
LLM Safety Alignment in Low-Resource Languages: A Systematic Literature Review
Valdini Douglace Lemofouet, Blessing Ngozi Uzor, Paula Chikaodinaka Anyanwu +9
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved substantial progress in safety alignment, yet their safety guarantees remain significantly weaker in low-resource and multilingual settin…
AFRILANGTUTOR: Advancing Language Tutoring and Culture Education in Low-Resource Languages with Large Language Models
Tadesse Destaw Belay, Shahriar Kabir Nahin, Israel Abebe Azime +6
How can language learning systems be developed for languages that lack sufficient training resources? This challenge is increasingly faced by developers across the African continen…
Beyond Majority Voting: Agreement-Based Clustering to Model Annotator Perspectives in Subjective NLP Tasks
Tadesse Destaw Belay, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Idris Abdulmumin +6
Disagreement in annotation is a common phenomenon in the development of NLP datasets and serves as a valuable source of insight. While majority voting remains the dominant strategy…
SemEval-2026 Task 9: Detecting Multilingual, Multicultural and Multievent Online Polarization
Usman Naseem, Robert Geislinger, Juan Ren +31
We present SemEval-2026 Task 9, a shared task on online polarization detection, covering 22 languages and comprising over 110K annotated instances. Each data instance is multi-labe…
AmharicStoryQA: A Multicultural Story Question Answering Benchmark in Amharic
Israel Abebe Azime, Abenezer Kebede Angamo, Hana Mekonen Tamiru +4
With the growing emphasis on multilingual and cultural evaluation benchmarks for large language models, language and culture are often treated as synonymous, and performance is com…
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…
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for African Low-Resource Languages: A Systematic Literature Review
Sukairaj Hafiz Imam, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Kedir Yassin Husse +7
ASR has achieved remarkable global progress, yet African low-resource languages remain rigorously underrepresented, producing barriers to digital inclusion across the continent wit…
Evaluating Deep Learning Models for African Wildlife Image Classification: From DenseNet to Vision Transformers
Lukman Jibril Aliyu, Umar Sani Muhammad, Bilqisu Ismail +5
Wildlife populations in Africa face severe threats, with vertebrate numbers declining by over 65% in the past five decades. In response, image classification using deep learning ha…
A Case Against Implicit Standards: Homophone Normalization in Machine Translation for Languages that use the Ge'ez Script
Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Henok Biadglign Ademtew +4
Homophone normalization, where characters that have the same sound in a writing script are mapped to one character, is a pre-processing step applied in Amharic Natural Language Pro…
HatePRISM: Policies, Platforms, and Research Integration. Advancing NLP for Hate Speech Proactive Mitigation
Naquee Rizwan, Seid Muhie Yimam, Daryna Dementieva +11
Despite regulations imposed by nations and social media platforms, e.g. (Government of India, 2021; European Parliament and Council of the European Union, 2022), inter alia, hatefu…
The State of Large Language Models for African Languages: Progress and Challenges
Kedir Yassin Hussen, Walelign Tewabe Sewunetie, Abinew Ali Ayele +3
Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming Natural Language Processing (NLP), but their benefits are largely absent for Africa's 2,000 low-resource languages. This paper compara…
KI4Demokratie: An AI-Based Platform for Monitoring and Fostering Democratic Discourse
Rudy Alexandro Garrido Veliz, Till Nikolaus Schaland, Simon Bergmoser +6
Social media increasingly fuel extremism, especially right-wing extremism, and enable the rapid spread of antidemocratic narratives. Although AI and data science are often leverage…
Automatic Speech Recognition for African Low-Resource Languages: Challenges and Future Directions
Sukairaj Hafiz Imam, Babangida Sani, Dawit Ketema Gete +6
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technologies have transformed human-computer interaction; however, low-resource languages in Africa remain significantly underrepresented in both…
POLAR: A Benchmark for Multilingual, Multicultural, and Multi-Event Online Polarization
Usman Naseem, Robert Geislinger, Juan Ren +40
Online polarization poses a growing challenge for democratic discourse, yet most computational social science research remains monolingual, culturally narrow, or event-specific. We…
SemEval-2025 Task 11: Bridging the Gap in Text-Based Emotion Detection
Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Nedjma Ousidhoum, Idris Abdulmumin +18
We present our shared task on text-based emotion detection, covering more than 30 languages from seven distinct language families. These languages are predominantly low-resource an…
Whispering in Amharic: Fine-tuning Whisper for Low-resource Language
Dawit Ketema Gete, Bedru Yimam Ahmed, Tadesse Destaw Belay +11
This work explores fine-tuning OpenAI's Whisper automatic speech recognition (ASR) model for Amharic, a low-resource language, to improve transcription accuracy. While the foundati…
Exploring Cultural Nuances in Emotion Perception Across 15 African Languages
Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Shiran Dudy, Tadesse Destaw Belay +4
Understanding how emotions are expressed across languages is vital for building culturally-aware and inclusive NLP systems. However, emotion expression in African languages is unde…
Enhancing Multi-Label Emotion Analysis and Corresponding Intensities for Ethiopian Languages
Tadesse Destaw Belay, Dawit Ketema Gete, Abinew Ali Ayele +4
Developing and integrating emotion-understanding models are essential for a wide range of human-computer interaction tasks, including customer feedback analysis, marketing research…
AfroXLMR-Social: Adapting Pre-trained Language Models for African Languages Social Media Text
Tadesse Destaw Belay, Israel Abebe Azime, Ibrahim Said Ahmad +5
Language models built from various sources are the foundation of today's NLP progress. However, for many low-resource languages, the diversity of domains is often limited, more bia…
CULEMO: Cultural Lenses on Emotion -- Benchmarking LLMs for Cross-Cultural Emotion Understanding
Tadesse Destaw Belay, Ahmed Haj Ahmed, Alvin Grissom +4
NLP research has increasingly focused on subjective tasks such as emotion analysis. However, existing emotion benchmarks suffer from two major shortcomings: (1) they largely rely o…
AfriHate: A Multilingual Collection of Hate Speech and Abusive Language Datasets for African Languages
Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Idris Abdulmumin, Abinew Ali Ayele +24
Hate speech and abusive language are global phenomena that need socio-cultural background knowledge to be understood, identified, and moderated. However, in many regions of the Glo…
Evaluating the Capabilities of Large Language Models for Multi-label Emotion Understanding
Tadesse Destaw Belay, Israel Abebe Azime, Abinew Ali Ayele +5
Large Language Models (LLMs) show promising learning and reasoning abilities. Compared to other NLP tasks, multilingual and multi-label emotion evaluation tasks are under-explored…
Multilingual and Explainable Text Detoxification with Parallel Corpora
Daryna Dementieva, Nikolay Babakov, Amit Ronen +11
Even with various regulations in place across countries and social media platforms (Government of India, 2021; European Parliament and Council of the European Union, 2022, digital…