Papers by Ignatius Ezeani
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. |
The IgboAPI Dataset: Empowering Igbo Language Technologies through Multi-dialectal Enrichment (2024.lrec-main)
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Chris Chinenye Emezue, Ifeoma Okoh, Chinedu Emmanuel Mbonu, Chiamaka Chukwuneke, Daisy Monika Lal, Ignatius Ezeani, Paul Rayson, Ijemma Onwuzulike, Chukwuma Onyebuchi Okeke, Gerald Okey Nweya, Bright Ikechukwu Ogbonna, Chukwuebuka Uchenna Oraegbunam, Esther Chidinma Awo-Ndubuisi, Akudo Amarachukwu Osuagwu
| Challenge: | UNESCO projects that the Igbo language will be endangered by 2025 . primary obstacle in developing dialectal-aware language technologies is lack of comprehensive dialectal datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multi-dialectal Igbo-English dictionary dataset to enhance the representation of Igbe dialects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset enables machine translation systems to handle dialect variations in sentences. |
Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languages (2020.findings-emnlp)
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Wilhelmina Nekoto, Vukosi Marivate, Tshinondiwa Matsila, Timi Fasubaa, Taiwo Fagbohungbe, Solomon Oluwole Akinola, Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Salomon Kabongo Kabenamualu, Salomey Osei, Freshia Sackey, Rubungo Andre Niyongabo, Ricky Macharm, Perez Ogayo, Orevaoghene Ahia, Musie Meressa Berhe, Mofetoluwa Adeyemi, Masabata Mokgesi-Selinga, Lawrence Okegbemi, Laura Martinus, Kolawole Tajudeen, Kevin Degila, Kelechi Ogueji, Kathleen Siminyu, Julia Kreutzer, Jason Webster, Jamiil Toure Ali, Jade Abbott, Iroro Orife, Ignatius Ezeani, Idris Abdulkadir Dangana, Herman Kamper, Hady Elsahar, Goodness Duru, Ghollah Kioko, Murhabazi Espoir, Elan van Biljon, Daniel Whitenack, Christopher Onyefuluchi, Chris Chinenye Emezue, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Blessing Sibanda, Blessing Bassey, Ayodele Olabiyi, Arshath Ramkilowan, Alp Öktem, Adewale Akinfaderin, Abdallah Bashir
| Challenge: | 'Low-resourced'-ness is a complex problem that goes beyond data availability and reflects systemic problems in society. |
| Approach: | They propose to use machine translation to scale to low-resourced languages by using a dataset and a benchmarking system to measure their resource use. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach allows participants without formal training to make a unique scientific contribution. |
Introducing the Welsh Text Summarisation Dataset and Baseline Systems (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Welsh is an official language in Wales and is spoken by an estimated 884,300 people . historically, the language has been in decline and represents a minority language in the country despite having official status . |
| Approach: | They introduce the first Welsh summarisation dataset which is available to researchers as a free resource. |
| Outcome: | The proposed summarisation system will be used as a benchmark for summarisers in other minority language contexts. |
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. |
Infrastructure for Semantic Annotation in the Genomics Domain (2020.lrec-1)
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Mahmoud El-Haj, Nathan Rutherford, Matthew Coole, Ignatius Ezeani, Sheryl Prentice, Nancy Ide, Jo Knight, Scott Piao, John Mariani, Paul Rayson, Keith Suderman
| Challenge: | a novel infrastructure for biomedical text mining combines NLP and corpus linguistics methods to provide a comprehensive corpus for literature-based discovery. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel pipeline for the collection, annotation, storage, retrieval and analysis of biomedical and life sciences literature . it uses an updatable Gene Ontology Semantic Tagger and a NLP pipeline scheduler to collect and process the corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed infrastructure allows for extreme-scale research on the open access PubMed Central archive. |
IgboBERT Models: Building and Training Transformer Models for the Igbo Language (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | This paper focuses on building resources for named entity recognition for Igbo, a language mainly spoken in the south eastern part of Nigeria. |
| Approach: | They present a standard Igbo named entity recognition dataset and results from fine-tuning transformer IgbeNER models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset and model improves on the IgboNER task while training and fine-tuning a transformer model with comparatively little Igbe text data. |
LENS: Learning Entities from Narratives of Skin Cancer (2025.coling-demos)
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| Challenge: | Learning entities from narratives of skin cancer (LENS) is an automatic entity recognition system built on colloquial writings from skin cancer-related forums. |
| Approach: | They propose to use reddit forums to create an automatic entity recognition system that can be used to predict skin cancer outcomes. |
| Outcome: | LENS achieves an overall entity-level F1 score of 0.561 . other notable results include “CANC_T” (0.747), “STG” (0.888), “POB” (0.914), “GENDER” (0.750), “A/G” (00.646), “EMO” (0.619), and “MHD” (0.503). |
Igbo Diacritic Restoration using Embedding Models (N18-4)
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| Challenge: | Igbo is a low-resource language spoken by approximately 30 million people worldwide. |
| Approach: | They propose to use word embeddings to restore diacritics in Igbo by using a pre-processing task that replaces missing diacrittics on words from which they have been removed. |
| Outcome: | The embedding models performed better than n-gram models on the diacritic restoration task. |
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 . |