Papers by Debela Desalegn Yadeta
Afri-MCQA: Multimodal Cultural Question Answering for African Languages (2026.acl-long)
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Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Srija Anand, Emilio Villa-Cueva, Israel Abebe Azime, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, Muhidin A. Mohamed, Debela Desalegn Yadeta, Negasi Haile Abadi, Abigail Oppong, Nnaemeka Casmir Obiefuna, Idris Abdulmumin, Naome A Etori, Eric Peter Wairagala, Kanda Patrick Tshinu, Imanigirimbabazi Emmanuel, Gabofetswe Malema, Alham Fikri Aji, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Thamar Solorio
| Challenge: | Afri-MCQA is the first multilingual cultural question-answering benchmark containing 7.5k Q A pairs across 15 African languages from 12 countries. |
| Approach: | They introduce Afri-MCQA, the first multilingual cultural question-answering benchmark containing 7.5k Q A pairs across 15 African languages from 12 countries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows poor performance across cultures, with near zero accuracy on open-ended VQA when queried through native language or speech. |
CaMMT: Benchmarking Culturally Aware Multimodal Machine Translation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Emilio Villa-Cueva, Sholpan Bolatzhanova, Diana Turmakhan, Kareem Elzeky, Henok Biadglign Ademtew, Alham Fikri Aji, Vladimir Araujo, Israel Abebe Azime, Jinheon Baek, Frederico Belcavello, Fermin Cristobal, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Mary Dabre, Raj Dabre, Toqeer Ehsan, Naome A Etori, Fauzan Farooqui, Jiahui Geng, Guido Ivetta, Thanmay Jayakumar, Soyeong Jeong, Zheng Wei Lim, Aishik Mandal, Sofía Martinelli, Mihail Minkov Mihaylov, Daniil Orel, Aniket Pramanick, Sukannya Purkayastha, Israfel Salazar, Haiyue Song, Tiago Timponi Torrent, Debela Desalegn Yadeta, Injy Hamed, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Thamar Solorio
| Challenge: | a human-curated benchmark of over 5,800 triples of images is used to evaluate multimodal translation systems. |
| Approach: | They introduce a human-curated benchmark of over 5,800 triples of images along with parallel captions in English and regional languages. |
| Outcome: | The results show that visual context improves translation quality in culturally-specific items . |
ProverbEval: Exploring LLM Evaluation Challenges for Low-resource Language Understanding (2025.findings-naacl)
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Israel Abebe Azime, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Yonas Chanie, Bontu Fufa Balcha, Negasi Haile Abadi, Henok Biadglign Ademtew, Mulubrhan Abebe Nerea, Debela Desalegn Yadeta, Derartu Dagne Geremew, Assefa Atsbiha Tesfu, Philipp Slusallek, Thamar Solorio, Dietrich Klakow
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) evaluation is gaining increasing attention as they are typically trained on general-domain datasets while demonstrating notable performance on tasks out of their training domains. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM evaluation benchmark for low-resource languages that focuses on low-rsource language understanding in culture-specific scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks outperform monolingual evaluations on proverb generation tasks and native language proverb descriptions on multiple choice tasks. |