Papers by Abinew Ali Ayele
POLAR: A Benchmark for Multilingual, Multicultural, and Multi-Event Online Polarization (2026.findings-acl)
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Usman Naseem, Robert Geislinger, Juan Ren, Sarah Kohail, Rudy Alexandro Garrido Veliz, P Sam Sahil, Yiran Zhang, Idris Abdulmumin, Marco Antonio Stranisci, Özge Alacam, Cengiz Acarturk, Aisha Jabr, Saba Anwar, Abinew Ali Ayele, Simona Frenda, Alessandra Teresa Cignarella, Elena Tutubalina, Oleg Rogov, Aung Kyaw Htet, Xintong Wang, Surendrabikram Thapa, Kritesh Rauniyar, Tanmoy Chakraborty, MD Arfeen Zeeshan, Dheeraj Kodati, Satya Keerthi, Sahar Moradizeyveh, Firoj Alam, Md Arid Hasan, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, Ye Kyaw Thu, Shantipriya Parida, Ihsan Ayyub Qazi, Lilian Diana Awuor Wanzare, Nelson Odhiambo Onyango, Clemencia Siro, Jane Wanjiru Kimani, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Adem Chanie Ali, Martin Semmann, Chris Biemann, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Seid Muhie Yimam
| Challenge: | polarization is a pervasive threat to democratic institutions, civil discourse, and social cohesion worldwide . most existing datasets focus on English or high-resource languages, reflecting a widespread trend across NLP tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual, multicultural, and multi-event dataset with over 110K instances in 22 languages drawn from diverse online platforms and real-world events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset analyzes polarization detection, type, and manifestation using a variety of annotation platforms adapted to each cultural context. |
AfriHate: A Multilingual Collection of Hate Speech and Abusive Language Datasets for African Languages (2025.naacl-long)
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Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Idris Abdulmumin, Abinew Ali Ayele, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Saminu Mohammad Aliyu, Paul Röttger, Abigail Oppong, Andiswa Bukula, Chiamaka Ijeoma Chukwuneke, Ebrahim Chekol Jibril, Elyas Abdi Ismail, Esubalew Alemneh, Hagos Tesfahun Gebremichael, Lukman Jibril Aliyu, Meriem Beloucif, Oumaima Hourrane, Rooweither Mabuya, Salomey Osei, Samuel Rutunda, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Tadesse Kebede Guge, Tesfa Tegegne Asfaw, Lilian Diana Awuor Wanzare, Nelson Odhiambo Onyango, Seid Muhie Yimam, Nedjma Ousidhoum
| Challenge: | Hate speech and abusive language are global phenomena that need sociocultural background knowledge to be understood, identified, and moderated. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multilingual dataset to collect hate speech and abusive language in 15 African languages to help improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets are based on tweets annotated by native speakers familiar with the regional culture and show that they perform well in low-resource settings. |
AfroXLMR-Social: Adapting Pre-trained Language Models for African Languages Social Media Text (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Tadesse Destaw Belay, Israel Abebe Azime, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Idris Abdulmumin, Abinew Ali Ayele, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Seid Muhie Yimam
| Challenge: | Domain adaptive pre-training and task-adaptive pre- training (TAPT) are popular methods to reduce this bias for low-resource languages, but they have not been explored for African multilingual encoders. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale social media and news domain corpus for continual pre-training on African languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve performance on three subjective tasks, including sentiment analysis, multi-label emotion, and hate speech classification, while TAPT improves performance on other related tasks. |
EthioLLM: Multilingual Large Language Models for Ethiopian Languages with Task Evaluation (2024.lrec-main)
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Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Israel Abebe Azime, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Mesay Gemeda Yigezu, Moges Ahmed Ah Mehamed, Abinew Ali Ayele, Ebrahim Chekol Jibril, Michael Melese Woldeyohannis, Olga Kolesnikova, Philipp Slusallek, Dietrich Klakow, Seid Muhie Yimam
| Challenge: | Low-resource languages are lagging behind current state-of-the-art (SOTA) developments in the field of NLP due to insufficient resources to train LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multilingual large language models for five Ethiopian languages and a benchmark dataset to evaluate their performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform existing models in five Ethiopian languages and a benchmark dataset for various downstream NLP tasks. |
Evaluating the Capabilities of Large Language Models for Multi-label Emotion Understanding (2025.coling-main)
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Tadesse Destaw Belay, Israel Abebe Azime, Abinew Ali Ayele, Grigori Sidorov, Dietrich Klakow, Philip Slusallek, Olga Kolesnikova, Seid Muhie Yimam
| Challenge: | Emotion classification is one of the most challenging tasks in large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multi-label emotion classification dataset for four Ethiopian languages to evaluate their ability to learn and reason. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the understanding of emotions in language models and how people convey emotions through various languages. |
Multilingual and Explainable Text Detoxification with Parallel Corpora (2025.coling-main)
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Daryna Dementieva, Nikolay Babakov, Amit Ronen, Abinew Ali Ayele, Naquee Rizwan, Florian Schneider, Xintong Wang, Seid Muhie Yimam, Daniil Alekhseevich Moskovskiy, Elisei Stakovskii, Eran Kaufman, Ashraf Elnagar, Animesh Mukherjee, Alexander Panchenko
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to manage toxic speech on social platforms are limited . however, there is a need for more proactive moderation of abusive speech. |
| Approach: | They extend parallel text detoxification corpus to new languages to test the approach . they propose a method that combines toxic and non-toxic sentences into a more neutral form . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method integrates the descriptive features of toxic and non-toxic sentences into a more neutral or non- toxic form. |