Papers by Hizkiel Mitiku Alemayehu
A Case Against Implicit Standards: Homophone Normalization in Machine Translation for Languages that use the Ge’ez Script. (2025.emnlp-main)
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Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Henok Biadglign Ademtew, Hizkiel Mitiku Alemayehu, Negasi Haile Abadi, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Seid Muhie Yimam
| Challenge: | Homophone normalization is a pre-processing step used in Amharic natural language processing (NLP) but it also results in models that are unable to process different forms of writing in a single language. |
| Approach: | They propose a method where normalization is applied to model predictions instead of training data and a scheme where normalized data is preserved in training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an increase in BLEU score of up to 1.03 while preserving language features in training. |
Exploring Amharic Sentiment Analysis from Social Media Texts: Building Annotation Tools and Classification Models (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing crowdsourcing platforms do not support sentiment analysis for Amharic, and there are no expert researchers in the area. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a social-network-friendly Amharic sentiment analysis tool using the Telegram bot and collect 9.4k tweets where each tweet is annotated by three Telegram users. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing classifiers in Amharic and other low-resource languages due to the widespread use of sarcasm and figurative speech. |