Papers by Seid Muhie Yimam
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. |
Demonstrating Par4Sem - A Semantic Writing Aid with Adaptive Paraphrasing (D18-2)
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| Challenge: | a new tool for semantic writing aids collects training examples from usage data. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic writing aid tool based on adaptive paraphrasing that integrates into a real word application to collect training examples from usage data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool is integrated into a real word application to collect training examples from usage data. |
POLAR: A Benchmark for Multilingual, Multicultural, and Multi-Event Online Polarization (2026.findings-acl)
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Usman Naseem, Robert Geislinger, Juan Ren, Sarah Kohail, Rudy Alexandro Garrido Veliz, P Sam Sahil, Yiran Zhang, Idris Abdulmumin, Marco Antonio Stranisci, Özge Alacam, Cengiz Acarturk, Aisha Jabr, Saba Anwar, Abinew Ali Ayele, Simona Frenda, Alessandra Teresa Cignarella, Elena Tutubalina, Oleg Rogov, Aung Kyaw Htet, Xintong Wang, Surendrabikram Thapa, Kritesh Rauniyar, Tanmoy Chakraborty, MD Arfeen Zeeshan, Dheeraj Kodati, Satya Keerthi, Sahar Moradizeyveh, Firoj Alam, Md Arid Hasan, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, Ye Kyaw Thu, Shantipriya Parida, Ihsan Ayyub Qazi, Lilian Diana Awuor Wanzare, Nelson Odhiambo Onyango, Clemencia Siro, Jane Wanjiru Kimani, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Adem Chanie Ali, Martin Semmann, Chris Biemann, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Seid Muhie Yimam
| Challenge: | polarization is a pervasive threat to democratic institutions, civil discourse, and social cohesion worldwide . most existing datasets focus on English or high-resource languages, reflecting a widespread trend across NLP tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual, multicultural, and multi-event dataset with over 110K instances in 22 languages drawn from diverse online platforms and real-world events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset analyzes polarization detection, type, and manifestation using a variety of annotation platforms adapted to each cultural context. |
AfriHate: A Multilingual Collection of Hate Speech and Abusive Language Datasets for African Languages (2025.naacl-long)
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Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Idris Abdulmumin, Abinew Ali Ayele, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Saminu Mohammad Aliyu, Paul Röttger, Abigail Oppong, Andiswa Bukula, Chiamaka Ijeoma Chukwuneke, Ebrahim Chekol Jibril, Elyas Abdi Ismail, Esubalew Alemneh, Hagos Tesfahun Gebremichael, Lukman Jibril Aliyu, Meriem Beloucif, Oumaima Hourrane, Rooweither Mabuya, Salomey Osei, Samuel Rutunda, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Tadesse Kebede Guge, Tesfa Tegegne Asfaw, Lilian Diana Awuor Wanzare, Nelson Odhiambo Onyango, Seid Muhie Yimam, Nedjma Ousidhoum
| Challenge: | Hate speech and abusive language are global phenomena that need sociocultural background knowledge to be understood, identified, and moderated. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multilingual dataset to collect hate speech and abusive language in 15 African languages to help improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets are based on tweets annotated by native speakers familiar with the regional culture and show that they perform well in low-resource settings. |
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. |
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. |
CodeAnno: Extending WebAnno with Hierarchical Document Level Annotation and Automation (2023.eacl-demo)
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Florian Schneider, Seid Muhie Yimam, Fynn Petersen-frey, Gerret Von Nordheim, Katharina Kleinen-von K”onigsl”ow, Chris Biemann
| Challenge: | WebAnno focuses on document-level annotation, which is complicated. |
| Approach: | They propose to create hierarchical codebooks that allow to move and sort categories in the hierarchy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is based on the existing WebAnno annotation tools and is compatible with existing spreadsheet applications. |
SCoT: Sense Clustering over Time: a tool for the analysis of lexical change (2021.eacl-demos)
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| Challenge: | Sense Clustering over Time (SCoT) is a network-based tool for analysing lexical change . it visualises word formation, change, and demise as clusters of similar words . SCoT has been successfully used in a European study on the changing meaning of ‘crisis’. |
| Approach: | They propose a new network-based tool for analysing lexical change using a dynamic network of word similarities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool has been successfully used in a European study on the changing meaning of ‘crisis’. |
Elvis vs. M. Jackson: Who has More Albums? Classification and Identification of Elements in Comparative Questions (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Comparative Question Answering (cQA) is the task of providing accurate answers to questions . most question answering systems focus on answering factoid questions, but they fail at answering comparative questions in an efficient argumentative manner. |
| Approach: | They propose two new open-domain datasets for identifying and labeling comparative questions . they use a binary classification task and an unsupervised sequence labeling task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets reach close-to-human results on a binary classification task with a neural model using ALBERT embeddings. |
A Multilingual Information Extraction Pipeline for Investigative Journalism (D18-2)
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| Challenge: | a new pipeline is being developed to process large collections of unstructured textual data . the pipeline is a key input processor for the upcoming major release of our software . |
| Approach: | a new pipeline is introduced to extract large amounts of unstructured data . the pipeline is used by journalists to process large files containing unknown contents . |
| Outcome: | the pipeline is an input processor for the upcoming major release of our new/s/leak 2.0 software. |
AfroXLMR-Social: Adapting Pre-trained Language Models for African Languages Social Media Text (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Tadesse Destaw Belay, Israel Abebe Azime, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Idris Abdulmumin, Abinew Ali Ayele, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Seid Muhie Yimam
| Challenge: | Domain adaptive pre-training and task-adaptive pre- training (TAPT) are popular methods to reduce this bias for low-resource languages, but they have not been explored for African multilingual encoders. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale social media and news domain corpus for continual pre-training on African languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve performance on three subjective tasks, including sentiment analysis, multi-label emotion, and hate speech classification, while TAPT improves performance on other related tasks. |
LECTURE4ALL: A Lightweight Approach to Precise Timestamp Detection in Online Lecture Videos (2025.acl-demo)
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Viktoria Wrobel, Simon Kazemi, Frank Hammerschmidt, Torben Hannemann, Gregor Stange, Seid Muhie Yimam, Robert Geislinger
| Challenge: | Lecture2Go provides a vast collection of recorded lectures, but locating specific content within videos can be time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They present an open-source web application to improve the search experience of educational video platforms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution improves the search experience of educational video platforms. |
HatePRISM: Policies, Platforms, and Research Integration. Advancing NLP for Hate Speech Proactive Mitigation (2025.findings-acl)
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Naquee Rizwan, Seid Muhie Yimam, Daryna Dementieva, Dr. Florian Skupin, Tim Fischer, Daniil Moskovskiy, Aarushi Ajay Borkar, Robert Geislinger, Punyajoy Saha, Sarthak Roy, Martin Semmann, Alexander Panchenko, Chris Biemann, Animesh Mukherjee
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to manage hate speech rely on reactive measures such as blocking or suspending offensive messages . despite regulations imposed by nations and social media platforms, hateful content remains a challenge . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automated hate speech moderation based on different strategies . they examine hate speech regulations and strategies from three perspectives . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework could be based on a combination of country regulations, social platform policies, and NLP research datasets. |
EthioLLM: Multilingual Large Language Models for Ethiopian Languages with Task Evaluation (2024.lrec-main)
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Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Israel Abebe Azime, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Mesay Gemeda Yigezu, Moges Ahmed Ah Mehamed, Abinew Ali Ayele, Ebrahim Chekol Jibril, Michael Melese Woldeyohannis, Olga Kolesnikova, Philipp Slusallek, Dietrich Klakow, Seid Muhie Yimam
| Challenge: | Low-resource languages are lagging behind current state-of-the-art (SOTA) developments in the field of NLP due to insufficient resources to train LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multilingual large language models for five Ethiopian languages and a benchmark dataset to evaluate their performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform existing models in five Ethiopian languages and a benchmark dataset for various downstream NLP tasks. |
Evaluating the Capabilities of Large Language Models for Multi-label Emotion Understanding (2025.coling-main)
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Tadesse Destaw Belay, Israel Abebe Azime, Abinew Ali Ayele, Grigori Sidorov, Dietrich Klakow, Philip Slusallek, Olga Kolesnikova, Seid Muhie Yimam
| Challenge: | Emotion classification is one of the most challenging tasks in large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multi-label emotion classification dataset for four Ethiopian languages to evaluate their ability to learn and reason. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the understanding of emotions in language models and how people convey emotions through various languages. |
Word Complexity is in the Eye of the Beholder (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Lexical complexity is a subjective notion, yet it is often neglected in lexical simplification and readability systems which use a ”one-size-fits-all” approach. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset of complex words annotated by readers with different backgrounds to investigate which aspects contribute to the notion of lexical complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can be replicated in a dataset of complex words annotated by readers with different backgrounds. |
Automatic Compilation of Resources for Academic Writing and Evaluating with Informal Word Identification and Paraphrasing System (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | a systematic review of academic writing aids aims to build a writing aid system that automatically edits a text to adhere to the academic style of writing. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a writing aid system that automatically edits a text to adhere to the academic style of writing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing academic resources in terms of word identification and ranking . the informal word identification component achieves an F-1 score of 82% . |
Multilingual and Explainable Text Detoxification with Parallel Corpora (2025.coling-main)
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Daryna Dementieva, Nikolay Babakov, Amit Ronen, Abinew Ali Ayele, Naquee Rizwan, Florian Schneider, Xintong Wang, Seid Muhie Yimam, Daniil Alekhseevich Moskovskiy, Elisei Stakovskii, Eran Kaufman, Ashraf Elnagar, Animesh Mukherjee, Alexander Panchenko
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to manage toxic speech on social platforms are limited . however, there is a need for more proactive moderation of abusive speech. |
| Approach: | They extend parallel text detoxification corpus to new languages to test the approach . they propose a method that combines toxic and non-toxic sentences into a more neutral form . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method integrates the descriptive features of toxic and non-toxic sentences into a more neutral or non- toxic form. |
Par4Sim – Adaptive Paraphrasing for Text Simplification (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | a new challenge is learning from a real-world data stream and continuously updating the model without explicit supervision. |
| Approach: | They develop an adaptive learning system for text simplification which improves the underlying ranking model from usage data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves the learning-to-rank model from usage data over time. |
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. |
ActiveAnno: General-Purpose Document-Level Annotation Tool with Active Learning Integration (2021.naacl-demos)
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| Challenge: | Existing tools for document-level annotation lack document-based quality and flexibility. |
| Approach: | a new annotation tool is being developed for industry and research use cases . a configurable user interface and a RESTful API are included . authors propose to use ACTIVEANNO as default for document-level annotation . |
| Outcome: | ACTIVEANNO is an annotation tool for industry and research use cases. |
CULEMO: Cultural Lenses on Emotion - Benchmarking LLMs for Cross-Cultural Emotion Understanding (2025.acl-long)
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Tadesse Destaw Belay, Ahmed Haj Ahmed, Alvin C Grissom Ii, Iqra Ameer, Grigori Sidorov, Olga Kolesnikova, Seid Muhie Yimam
| Challenge: | Existing emotion benchmarks rely on keyword-based emotion recognition, overlooking cultural dimensions required for emotion understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate culturally-aware emotion prediction across six languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates state-of-the-art LLMs on culture-aware emotion prediction and sentiment analysis tasks. |