Papers by Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi
CommonLID: Re-evaluating State-of-the-Art Language Identification Performance on Web Data (2026.acl-long)
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Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Laurie Burchell, Catherine Arnett, Rafael Mosquera, Sara Hincapié Monsalve, Thom Vaughan, Damian Stewart, Malte Ostendorff, Idris Abdulmumin, Vukosi Marivate, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Hend Al-Khalifa, Nadia Ghezaiel Hammouda, Verrah Akinyi Otiende, Tack Hwa Wong, Jakhongir Saydaliev, Melika Nobakhtian, Muhammad Ravi Shulthan Habibi, Chalamalasetti Kranti, Carol Muchemi, Khang Nguyen, Faisal Muhammad Adam, Luis Frentzen Salim, Reem Alqifari, Cynthia Jayne Amol, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Ilker Kesen, Ahmad Mustafid, Pavel Stepachev, Leshem Choshen, David Anugraha, Hamada Nayel, Seid Muhie Yimam, Vallerie Alexandra Putra, My Chiffon Nguyen, Azmine Toushik Wasi, Gouthami Vadithya, Rob Van Der Goot, Lanwenn ar C’horr, Karan Dua, Andrew Yates, Mithil Bangera, Yeshil Bangera, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Shu Okabe, Fenal Ashokbhai Ilasariya, Dmitry Gaynullin, Genta Indra Winata, Yiyuan Li, Juan Pablo Martínez, Amit Agarwal, Ikhlasul Akmal Hanif, Raia Abu Ahmad, Esther Adenuga, Filbert Aurelian Tjiaranata, Weerayut Buaphet, Michael Anugraha, Sowmya Vajjala, Benjamin L Rice, Azril Hafizi Amirudin, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, Srikant Panda, Yassine Toughrai, Bruhan Kyomuhendo, Daniel Ruffinelli, null Akshata, Manuel Goulão, Ej Zhou, Ingrid Gabriela Franco Ramirez, Cristina Aggazzotti, Konstantin Dobler, Jun Kevin, Quentin Pagès, Nicholas Andrews, Nuhu Ibrahim, Mattes Ruckdeschel, Amr Keleg, Mike Zhang, Casper Rufaro Muziri, Saron Samuel, Sotaro Takeshita, Kun Kerdthaisong, Luca Foppiano, Rasul Dent, Tommaso Green, Ahmad Mustapha Wali, Kamohelo Makaaka, Vicky Feliren, Inshirah Idris, Hande Celikkanat, Abdulhamid Abubakar, Jean Maillard, Benoît Sagot, Thibault Clérice, Kenton Murray, Sarah K. K. Luger
| Challenge: | Language identification (LID) is a fundamental step in curating multilingual corpora. |
| Approach: | They introduce CommonLID, a community-driven, human-annotated LID benchmark for the web domain, covering 109 languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 109 languages and shows that existing evaluations overestimate accuracy for many languages in the web domain. |
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 . |
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. |
Charting the Landscape of African NLP: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Ahead (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | African languages are often left behind in state-of-the-art natural language processing systems and large language models. |
| Approach: | They analyze 884 research papers on NLP for African languages published over past five years . they identify key trends shaping the field and outline promising directions . |
| Outcome: | The findings identify key trends shaping the field and outline promising directions . the authors analyze 884 research papers on NLP for African languages published over the past five years . |
IrokoBench: A New Benchmark for African Languages in the Age of Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Jessica Ojo, Israel Abebe Azime, Jian Yun Zhuang, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, Xuanli He, Millicent Ochieng, Sara Hooker, Andiswa Bukula, En-Shiun Annie Lee, Chiamaka Ijeoma Chukwuneke, Happy Buzaaba, Blessing Kudzaishe Sibanda, Godson Koffi Kalipe, Jonathan Mukiibi, Salomon Kabongo Kabenamualu, Foutse Yuehgoh, Mmasibidi Setaka, Lolwethu Ndolela, Nkiruka Odu, Rooweither Mabuya, Salomey Osei, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Sokhar Samb, Tadesse Kebede Guge, Tombekai Vangoni Sherman, Pontus Stenetorp
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are limited to a few high-resource languages . many low-resourced languages are evaluated only on basic text classification tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose to use IrokoBench to evaluate 17 low-resource African languages . they use human-translated benchmark datasets to evaluate zero-shot, few-shot and translate-test settings . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well in English and French, but the highest performing model perform poorly in proprietary models. |
INJONGO: A Multicultural Intent Detection and Slot-filling Dataset for 16 African Languages (2025.acl-long)
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Hao Yu, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, Andiswa Bukula, Jian Yun Zhuang, En-Shiun Annie Lee, Tadesse Kebede Guge, Israel Abebe Azime, Happy Buzaaba, Blessing Kudzaishe Sibanda, Godson Koffi Kalipe, Jonathan Mukiibi, Salomon Kabongo Kabenamualu, Mmasibidi Setaka, Lolwethu Ndolela, Nkiruka Odu, Rooweither Mabuya, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Salomey Osei, Sokhar Samb, Dietrich Klakow, David Ifeoluwa Adelani
| Challenge: | Slot-filling and intent detection tasks are well-established tasks in Conversational AI, but current benchmarks for these tasks rely on evaluations of low-resource languages and translations from English benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multilingual, open-source benchmark dataset for 16 African languages with utterances generated by native speakers across diverse domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset compares multilingual transformer models and prompting large language models (LLMs) with the English language. |
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. |