Papers by David Adelani
Machine Translation Hallucination Detection for Low and High Resource Languages using Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Kenza Benkirane, Laura Gongas, Shahar Pelles, Naomi Fuchs, Joshua Darmon, Pontus Stenetorp, David Adelani, Eduardo Sánchez
| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting hallucinations in machine translation are limited for low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They evaluate sentence-level hallucination detection approaches using Large Language Models (LLMs) they find that the choice of model is essential for performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform the existing models in HRLs and LRLs on average by 0.16 MCC. |
Preventing Author Profiling through Zero-Shot Multilingual Back-Translation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Documents as short as a single sentence may reveal sensitive information about authors . style transfer is effective but a number of current methods cause a drop in down-stream utility . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to remove sensitive information from documents by multilingual back-translation using off-the-shelf translation models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method lowers adversarial gender and race prediction by 22% while retaining 95% of original utility on downstream tasks. |
MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African Languages (2021.tacl-1)
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David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Jade Abbott, Graham Neubig, Daniel D’souza, Julia Kreutzer, Constantine Lignos, Chester Palen-Michel, Happy Buzaaba, Shruti Rijhwani, Sebastian Ruder, Stephen Mayhew, Israel Abebe Azime, Shamsuddeen H. Muhammad, Chris Chinenye Emezue, Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende, Perez Ogayo, Aremu Anuoluwapo, Catherine Gitau, Derguene Mbaye, Jesujoba Alabi, Seid Muhie Yimam, Tajuddeen Rabiu Gwadabe, Ignatius Ezeani, Rubungo Andre Niyongabo, Jonathan Mukiibi, Verrah Otiende, Iroro Orife, Davis David, Samba Ngom, Tosin Adewumi, Paul Rayson, Mofetoluwa Adeyemi, Gerald Muriuki, Emmanuel Anebi, Chiamaka Chukwuneke, Nkiruka Odu, Eric Peter Wairagala, Samuel Oyerinde, Clemencia Siro, Tobius Saul Bateesa, Temilola Oloyede, Yvonne Wambui, Victor Akinode, Deborah Nabagereka, Maurice Katusiime, Ayodele Awokoya, Mouhamadane MBOUP, Dibora Gebreyohannes, Henok Tilaye, Kelechi Nwaike, Degaga Wolde, Abdoulaye Faye, Blessing Sibanda, Orevaoghene Ahia, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Kelechi Ogueji, Thierno Ibrahima DIOP, Abdoulaye Diallo, Adewale Akinfaderin, Tendai Marengereke, Salomey Osei
| Challenge: | (2020) African languages are underrepresented in existing natural language processing datasets, research, and tools due to lack of datasets and reproducible results. |
| Approach: | They propose to create a dataset for named entity recognition (NER) in ten African languages. |
| Outcome: | The results of the first large dataset for named entity recognition (NER) in ten African languages are released to inform future research on African NLP. |
Better Quality Pre-training Data and T5 Models for African Languages (2023.emnlp-main)
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Akintunde Oladipo, Mofetoluwa Adeyemi, Orevaoghene Ahia, Abraham Owodunni, Odunayo Ogundepo, David Adelani, Jimmy Lin
| Challenge: | Existing web crawls have demonstrated quality issues for low-resource languages . Existing pretraining corpora have numerous quality issues . |
| Approach: | They propose to audit existing pretraining corpora to understand and rectify quality issues . they pretrain a new T5-based model and evaluate its performance on multiple tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing pretrained models on four NLP tasks. |
Massive vs. Curated Embeddings for Low-Resourced Languages: the Case of Yorùbá and Twi (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that word embeddings can be useful for training downstream natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They compare word embeddings obtained by word embeds from curated corpora with a language-dependent processing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model compares word embeddings with word embeds from curated corpora and a language-dependent processing on two African languages. |
AFRIDOC-MT: Document-level MT Corpus for African Languages (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, Israel Abebe Azime, Miaoran Zhang, Cristina España-Bonet, Rachel Bawden, Dawei Zhu, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Clement Oyeleke Odoje, Idris Akinade, Iffat Maab, Davis David, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Neo Putini, David O. Ademuyiwa, Andrew Caines, Dietrich Klakow
| Challenge: | AFRIDOC-MT is a document-level multi-parallel translation dataset covering five languages . AFRITIC-MT models perform better on sentences than general-purpose LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level multi-parallel translation dataset covering English and five African languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset covers 334 health and 271 information technology news documents . it shows that NLLB-200 achieves the best average performance among standard models . |
Pre-Trained Multilingual Sequence-to-Sequence Models: A Hope for Low-Resource Language Translation? (2022.findings-acl)
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En-Shiun Lee, Sarubi Thillainathan, Shravan Nayak, Surangika Ranathunga, David Adelani, Ruisi Su, Arya McCarthy
| Challenge: | Pre-trained multilingual sequence-to-sequence models like mBART and mT5 can be used to translate low-resource languages, but their practical application is unclear. |
| Approach: | They conduct an empirical experiment in 10 languages to determine what can pre-trained multilingual sequence-to-sequence models like mBART do to translate low-resource languages? |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are robust to domain differences, but translations for unseen and typologically distant languages remain below 3.0 BLEU. |
AfriSenti: A Twitter Sentiment Analysis Benchmark for African Languages (2023.emnlp-main)
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Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Idris Abdulmumin, Abinew Ayele, Nedjma Ousidhoum, David Adelani, Seid Yimam, Ibrahim Ahmad, Meriem Beloucif, Saif Mohammad, Sebastian Ruder, Oumaima Hourrane, Alipio Jorge, Pavel Brazdil, Felermino Ali, Davis David, Salomey Osei, Bello Shehu-Bello, Falalu Lawan, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Samuel Rutunda, Tadesse Belay, Wendimu Messelle, Hailu Balcha, Sisay Chala, Hagos Gebremichael, Bernard Opoku, Stephen Arthur
| Challenge: | Africa has the highest linguistic diversity among all continents. |
| Approach: | They introduce a sentiment analysis benchmark that contains >110,000 tweets in 14 African languages . they describe the data collection methodology, annotation process, and challenges . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains >110,000 tweets in 14 African languages . the tweets were annotated by native speakers and used in the shared task . |
WorldCuisines: A Massive-Scale Benchmark for Multilingual and Multicultural Visual Question Answering on Global Cuisines (2025.naacl-long)
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Genta Indra Winata, Frederikus Hudi, Patrick Amadeus Irawan, David Anugraha, Rifki Afina Putri, Wang Yutong, Adam Nohejl, Ubaidillah Ariq Prathama, Nedjma Ousidhoum, Afifa Amriani, Anar Rzayev, Anirban Das, Ashmari Pramodya, Aulia Adila, Bryan Wilie, Candy Olivia Mawalim, Cheng Ching Lam, Daud Abolade, Emmanuele Chersoni, Enrico Santus, Fariz Ikhwantri, Garry Kuwanto, Hanyang Zhao, Haryo Akbarianto Wibowo, Holy Lovenia, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Jan Wira Gotama Putra, Junho Myung, Lucky Susanto, Maria Angelica Riera Machin, Marina Zhukova, Michael Anugraha, Muhammad Farid Adilazuarda, Natasha Christabelle Santosa, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Raj Dabre, Rio Alexander Audino, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Shi-Xiong Zhang, Stephanie Yulia Salim, Yi Zhou, Yinxuan Gui, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, En-Shiun Annie Lee, Shogo Okada, Ayu Purwarianti, Alham Fikri Aji, Taro Watanabe, Derry Tanti Wijaya, Alice Oh, Chong-Wah Ngo
| Challenge: | Vision Language Models struggle with cultural-specific knowledge, especially in languages other than English and in underrepresented cultural contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual question answering (VQA) dataset with text-image pairs across 30 languages and dialects and a training dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better with correct location context, but struggles with adversarial contexts and predicting specific regional cuisines and languages. |
Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering for African Languages (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Odunayo Ogundepo, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Clara Rivera, Jonathan Clark, Sebastian Ruder, David Adelani, Bonaventure Dossou, Abdou Diop, Claytone Sikasote, Gilles Hacheme, Happy Buzaaba, Ignatius Ezeani, Rooweither Mabuya, Salomey Osei, Chris Emezue, Albert Kahira, Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Akintunde Oladipo, Abraham Owodunni, Atnafu Tonja, Iyanuoluwa Shode, Akari Asai, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Ayodele Awokoya, Bernard Opoku, Chiamaka Chukwuneke, Christine Mwase, Clemencia Siro, Stephen Arthur, Tunde Ajayi, Verrah Otiende, Andre Rubungo, Boyd Sinkala, Daniel Ajisafe, Emeka Onwuegbuzia, Falalu Lawan, Ibrahim Ahmad, Jesujoba Alabi, Chinedu Mbonu, Mofetoluwa Adeyemi, Mofya Phiri, Orevaoghene Ahia, Ruqayya Iro, Sonia Adhiambo
| Challenge: | Our Dataset is the first cross-lingual QA dataset with a focus on African languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use African languages as the only high-coverage source of answer content for cross-lingual open-retrieval question answering systems. |
| Outcome: | Our Dataset includes 12,000+ XOR QA examples across 10 African languages. |
AfriMTE and AfriCOMET: Enhancing COMET to Embrace Under-resourced African Languages (2024.naacl-long)
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Jiayi Wang, David Adelani, Sweta Agrawal, Marek Masiak, Ricardo Rei, Eleftheria Briakou, Marine Carpuat, Xuanli He, Sofia Bourhim, Andiswa Bukula, Muhidin Mohamed, Temitayo Olatoye, Tosin Adewumi, Hamam Mokayed, Christine Mwase, Wangui Kimotho, Foutse Yuehgoh, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Jessica Ojo, Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Salomey Osei, Abdul-Hakeem Omotayo, Chiamaka Chukwuneke, Perez Ogayo, Oumaima Hourrane, Salma El Anigri, Lolwethu Ndolela, Thabiso Mangwana, Shafie Mohamed, Hassan Ayinde, Oluwabusayo Awoyomi, Lama Alkhaled, Sana Al-azzawi, Naome Etori, Millicent Ochieng, Clemencia Siro, Njoroge Kiragu, Eric Muchiri, Wangari Kimotho, Toadoum Sari Sakayo, Lyse Naomi Wamba, Daud Abolade, Simbiat Ajao, Iyanuoluwa Shode, Ricky Macharm, Ruqayya Iro, Saheed Abdullahi, Stephen Moore, Bernard Opoku, Zainab Akinjobi, Abeeb Afolabi, Nnaemeka Obiefuna, Onyekachi Ogbu, Sam Ochieng’, Verrah Otiende, Chinedu Mbonu, Yao Lu, Pontus Stenetorp
| Challenge: | Recent advances in machine translation (MT) have focused on scaling multilingual machine translation models and evaluation data to hundreds of languages, including multiple under-resourced languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use n-gram matching metrics to measure progress in multilingual machine translation to 13 typologically diverse African languages to create high-quality human evaluation data with simplified MQM guidelines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metrics have a higher correlation with human judgments than n-gram matching metrics such as BLEU and METEOR. |
XTREME-UP: A User-Centric Scarce-Data Benchmark for Under-Represented Languages (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Sebastian Ruder, Jonathan Clark, Alexander Gutkin, Mihir Kale, Min Ma, Massimo Nicosia, Shruti Rijhwani, Parker Riley, Jean-Michel Sarr, Xinyi Wang, John Wieting, Nitish Gupta, Anna Katanova, Christo Kirov, Dana Dickinson, Brian Roark, Bidisha Samanta, Connie Tao, David Adelani, Vera Axelrod, Isaac Caswell, Colin Cherry, Dan Garrette, Reeve Ingle, Melvin Johnson, Dmitry Panteleev, Partha Talukdar
| Challenge: | Existing datasets are often informed by established research directions in the NLP community. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the capabilities of language models across 88 under-represented languages over 9 key user-centric technologies including ASR, OCR, MT, and information access tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the capabilities of language models across 88 under-represented languages over 9 key user-centric technologies including ASR, OCR, MT, and information access tasks. |
MCSE: Multimodal Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learning semantically meaningful sentence embeddings are limited by the complexity of pre-trained models. |
| Approach: | They propose a sentence embedding learning approach that exploits both visual and textual information via a multimodal contrastive objective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the state-of-the-art average Spearman’s correlation by 1.7% on a variety of semantic textual similarity tasks. |
Voices Unheard: NLP Resources and Models for Yorùbá Regional Dialects (2024.emnlp-main)
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Orevaoghene Ahia, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Diana Abagyan, Hila Gonen, David Adelani, Daud Abolade, Noah Smith, Yulia Tsvetkov
| Challenge: | Recent efforts to develop NLP tools for low-resource languages focus on their standard dialects. |
| Approach: | They propose a high-quality parallel text and speech corpus for Yoruba . they use native speakers to collect data from four regional yoruba dialects . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that dialect-adaptive finetuning can narrow performance disparities . the dataset will be released publicly under an open license . |
MINERS: Multilingual Language Models as Semantic Retrievers (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks have evaluated language models to evaluate their performance across a range of embedding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the robustness of multilingual language models in semantic retrieval tasks including bitext mining and classification via retrieval-augmented contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates the robustness of multilingual LMs in retrieval tasks across over 200 languages, including extremely low-resource languages in challenging cross-lingual and code-switching settings. |
Transfer Learning and Distant Supervision for Multilingual Transformer Models: A Study on African Languages (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that results from high-resource languages cannot be easily transferred to realistic, low-resourced scenarios. |
| Approach: | They analyse performance of multilingual transformer models using available resources for Hausa, isiXhosa and NER and topic classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can achieve with as little as 10 or 100 labeled sentences the same performance as baselines with much more supervised training data. |
MasakhaNER 2.0: Africa-centric Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognition (2022.emnlp-main)
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David Adelani, Graham Neubig, Sebastian Ruder, Shruti Rijhwani, Michael Beukman, Chester Palen-Michel, Constantine Lignos, Jesujoba Alabi, Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Peter Nabende, Cheikh M. Bamba Dione, Andiswa Bukula, Rooweither Mabuya, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Blessing Sibanda, Happy Buzaaba, Jonathan Mukiibi, Godson Kalipe, Derguene Mbaye, Amelia Taylor, Fatoumata Kabore, Chris Chinenye Emezue, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Perez Ogayo, Catherine Gitau, Edwin Munkoh-Buabeng, Victoire Memdjokam Koagne, Allahsera Auguste Tapo, Tebogo Macucwa, Vukosi Marivate, Mboning Tchiaze Elvis, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Tosin Adewumi, Orevaoghene Ahia, Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende, Neo Lerato Mokono, Ignatius Ezeani, Chiamaka Chukwuneke, Mofetoluwa Oluwaseun Adeyemi, Gilles Quentin Hacheme, Idris Abdulmumin, Odunayo Ogundepo, Oreen Yousuf, Tatiana Moteu, Dietrich Klakow
| Challenge: | Existing studies on named entity recognition methods for African languages focus on English as the source language, but there is evidence that it is not the best for low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use human-annotated datasets to analyze named entity recognition tasks in 20 African languages to test whether they are effective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves zero-shot F1 scores by 14% over 20 languages compared to using English . |
A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way! Leveraging Pre-trained Models for African News Translation (2022.naacl-main)
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David Adelani, Jesujoba Alabi, Angela Fan, Julia Kreutzer, Xiaoyu Shen, Machel Reid, Dana Ruiter, Dietrich Klakow, Peter Nabende, Ernie Chang, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Freshia Sackey, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Chris Emezue, Colin Leong, Michael Beukman, Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Guyo Jarso, Oreen Yousuf, Andre Niyongabo Rubungo, Gilles Hacheme, Eric Peter Wairagala, Muhammad Umair Nasir, Benjamin Ajibade, Tunde Ajayi, Yvonne Gitau, Jade Abbott, Mohamed Ahmed, Millicent Ochieng, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Perez Ogayo, Jonathan Mukiibi, Fatoumata Ouoba Kabore, Godson Kalipe, Derguene Mbaye, Allahsera Auguste Tapo, Victoire Memdjokam Koagne, Edwin Munkoh-Buabeng, Valencia Wagner, Idris Abdulmumin, Ayodele Awokoya, Happy Buzaaba, Blessing Sibanda, Andiswa Bukula, Sam Manthalu
| Challenge: | Low-resource languages are left out of large-scale pretraining datasets . authors explore how to leverage existing pre-trained models to create low-resourced translation systems for 16 African languages. |
| Approach: | They investigate how large-scale pre-trained models can be used to create low-resource translation systems for 16 African languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can translate between hundreds of languages even though there is little parallel data available for training. |
MERLIN: Multi-Stage Curriculum Alignment for Multilingual Encoder-LLM Integration in Cross-Lingual Reasoning (2026.eacl-long)
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Kosei Uemura, David Guzmán, Quang Phuoc Nguyen, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, En-Shiun Annie Lee, David Ifeoluwa Adelani
| Challenge: | Existing methods to align large language models with multilingual encoders raise accuracy for low-resource languages (LRLs) but performance of LLMs in low- and high-resourced languages remains a problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-stacking framework that iteratively refines in 2-stages based on a curriculum strategy and adapts only a small set of DoRA weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves exact-match accuracy by +12.9 pp over MindMerger and outperforms GPT-4o-mini by 15.2 pp on the AfriMGSM benchmark. |
SIB-200: A Simple, Inclusive, and Big Evaluation Dataset for Topic Classification in 200+ Languages and Dialects (2024.eacl-long)
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David Adelani, Hannah Liu, Xiaoyu Shen, Nikita Vassilyev, Jesujoba Alabi, Yanke Mao, Haonan Gao, En-Shiun Lee
| Challenge: | despite progress in building multilingual language models evaluation is limited to a few languages with available datasets . despite this, we create a large-scale open-sourced benchmark dataset for topic classification in 205 languages and dialects to address the lack of evaluation dataset for Natural Language Understanding (NLU). |
| Approach: | They create a large-scale open-sourced benchmark dataset for topic classification in 205 languages and dialects to address the lack of evaluation dataset for Natural Language Understanding (NLU). |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset addresses the lack of evaluation dataset for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) for many languages, it is the first publicly available evaluation dataset. |