48 citations · 57 across the 25 of their papers we have counts for
27 papers · 1 filter
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…
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…
Temporal Simultaneity Predicts Annotation Quality in Sentiment Corpora
Idris Abdulmumin, Mokgadi Penelope Matloga, Tadesse Destaw Belay +5
Annotation quality is difficult to sustain when campaigns span weeks or months with small annotator pools. We present a Setswana sentiment dataset of 3,565 tweets annotated by thre…
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…
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…
Linguistically Informed Evaluation of Multilingual ASR for African Languages
Fei-Yueh Chen, Lateef Adeleke, C. M. Downey
Word Error Rate (WER) mischaracterizes ASR models' performance for African languages by combining phonological, tone, and other linguistic errors into a single lexical error. By co…
MGSM-Pro: A Simple Strategy for Robust Multilingual Mathematical Reasoning Evaluation
Tianyi Xu, Kosei Uemura, Alfred Malengo Kondoro +6
Large language models have made substantial progress in mathematical reasoning. However, benchmark development for multilingual evaluation has lagged behind English in both difficu…
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…
Evaluation Sheet for Deep Research: A Use Case for Academic Survey Writing
Israel Abebe Azime, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja
Large Language Models (LLMs) powered with argentic capabilities are able to do knowledge-intensive tasks without human involvement. A prime example of this tool is Deep research wi…
The Rise of AfricaNLP: A Survey of Contributions, Contributors, Community Impact, and Bibliometric Analysis
Tadesse Destaw Belay, Kedir Yassin Hussen, Sukairaj Hafiz Imam +11
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is undergoing constant transformation, as Large Language Models (LLMs) are driving daily breakthroughs in research and practice. In this regard, t…
Bridging the Culture Gap: A Framework for LLM-Driven Socio-Cultural Localization of Math Word Problems in Low-Resource Languages
Israel Abebe Azime, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Dietrich Klakow +2
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant capabilities in solving mathematical problems expressed in natural language. However, multilingual and culturally-grounde…
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…
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…
ProverbEval: Exploring LLM Evaluation Challenges for Low-resource Language Understanding
Israel Abebe Azime, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Tadesse Destaw Belay +11
With the rapid development of evaluation datasets to assess LLMs understanding across a wide range of subjects and domains, identifying a suitable language understanding benchmark…
EthioLLM: Multilingual Large Language Models for Ethiopian Languages with Task Evaluation
Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Israel Abebe Azime, Tadesse Destaw Belay +10
Large language models (LLMs) have gained popularity recently due to their outstanding performance in various downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, low-resour…
Walia-LLM: Enhancing Amharic-LLaMA by Integrating Task-Specific and Generative Datasets
Israel Abebe Azime, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Tadesse Destaw Belay +6
Large language models (LLMs) have received a lot of attention in natural language processing (NLP) research because of their exceptional performance in understanding and generating…