Papers by Kelechi Ezema
AfriVox: Probing Multilingual and Accent Robustness of Speech LLMs (2026.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Busayo Awobade, Mardhiyah Sanni, Tassallah Abdullahi, Chibuzor Okocha, Kelechi Ezema, Devendra Deepak Kayande, Lukman Enegi Ismaila, Tobi Olatunji, Gloria Ashiya Katuka
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal and speech-native large language models have delivered impressive speech recognition, translation, understanding, and question-answering capabilities for high-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to benchmark African languages and African-accented French, Arabic, and 100+ African English accents across 20 African languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms traditional speech transcription and translation models in African languages and non-native French or English accents. |
AfriMMT-EA: Multi-domain Machine Translation for Low-Resource East African Languages (2026.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
Naome A Etori, Kelechi Ezema, Nathaniel Romney Robinson, Davis David, Alfred Malengo Kondoro, Elisha Ondieki Makori, Michael Samwel Mollel, Maria Gini
| Challenge: | Recent advances in open-source large language models have demonstrated strong multilingual capabilities through data-efficient adaptation strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose to use AfriMMT-EA to refine two multilingual versions of Gemma-3 to better understand the region's linguistic and cultural diversity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets comprise 54 local languages across five East African countries. |
Linguistic Alignment Predicts Learning in Small Group Tutoring Sessions (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Cognitive science offers rich theories of learning and communication, yet these are often difficult to operationalize at scale. |
| Approach: | They investigate linguistic alignment in a longitudinal dataset of real-world tutoring interactions and associated student test scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be applied to real-world tutoring interactions and student test scores. |