Papers by Nkiruka Odu
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. |
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. |