Dr. Idris Abdulmumin

I am a Research Associate at the University of Pretoria’s Data Science for Social Impact Research Group. My work focuses on improving Natural Language Processing (NLP) for underrepresented African languages. I hold a PhD from Bayero University Kano, where I focused on using domain awareness, quality estimation, and transfer learning to optimize approaches for leveraging monolingual data to enhance machine translation in low-resource languages. I currently serve as Principal Investigator of AfriGemma, advancing African-language NLP for research, healthcare, and societal benefit.

I have led and contributed to a range of impactful projects, including developing NLP resources and techniques for tasks such as LLM building, sentiment analysis, emotion analysis, semantic relatedness, hate and offensive speech analysis, machine translation, named-entity recognition, and sentence alignment. I actively collaborate with international research communities such as Masakhane, HausaNLP, LITHME, and the Open Language Data Initiative, and have contributed to several Semantic Evaluation shared tasks: AfriSenti 2023, SemRel 2024, BRIGHTER 2025, Dim-ABSA 2026, and POLAR 2026.

I’m passionate about mentoring students and early-career researchers, and I strive to integrate ethical, human-centric approaches into my work, aligning with my commitment to advancing NLP for social good. My research is driven by the belief that AI should be inclusive and accessible, and I aim to make meaningful contributions to the field while addressing the needs of underrepresented communities.

Research focus

Translation & Speech

Low-resource neural machine translation, back-translation, and automatic speech recognition & synthesis for African languages.

Sentiment, Emotion & Safety

Datasets and models for sentiment, emotion, semantic relatedness, and hate & offensive language analysis.

LLMs & Open Resources

African-centric large language models (e.g. AfriGemma), benchmarks, and openly available language resources.

News

Jun 02, 2026	Returning to AIMS South Africa as Visiting Professor to teach NLP & LLMs for the upcoming Nov–Dec 2026 cohort.
May 30, 2026	New preprint: Temporal Simultaneity Predicts Annotation Quality in Sentiment Corpora. 📄
May 28, 2026	New preprint: AfriScience-MT — Towards Decolonizing Science in Africa through Text Translation. 📄
Mar 25, 2026	Several papers at AfricaNLP 2026 (Rabat), where I also serve as a workshop co-organiser.
Jan 15, 2026	Co-organising two SemEval-2026 shared tasks — multilingual online polarization detection, and dimensional aspect-based sentiment & stance.

Selected publications

ACL

BRIGHTER: BRIdging the Gap in Human-Annotated Textual Emotion Recognition Datasets for 28 Languages

Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Nedjma Ousidhoum, Idris Abdulmumin, and 45 more authors

In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), Jul 2025

Best Resource Paper DOI Bib

Best Resource Paper at ACL 2025.

@inproceedings{muhammad-etal-2025-brighter,
  title = {{BRIGHTER}: {BRI}dging the Gap in Human-Annotated Textual Emotion Recognition Datasets for 28 Languages},
  author = {Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan and Ousidhoum, Nedjma and Abdulmumin, Idris and Wahle, Jan Philip and Ruas, Terry and Beloucif, Meriem and de Kock, Christine and Surange, Nirmal and Teodorescu, Daniela and Ahmad, Ibrahim Said and Adelani, David Ifeoluwa and Aji, Alham Fikri and Ali, Felermino D. M. A. and Alimova, Ilseyar and Araujo, Vladimir and Babakov, Nikolay and Baes, Naomi and Bucur, Ana-Maria and Bukula, Andiswa and Cao, Guanqun and Tufi{\~n}o, Rodrigo and Chevi, Rendi and Chukwuneke, Chiamaka Ijeoma and Ciobotaru, Alexandra and Dementieva, Daryna and Gadanya, Murja Sani and Geislinger, Robert and Gipp, Bela and Hourrane, Oumaima and Ignat, Oana and Lawan, Falalu Ibrahim and Mabuya, Rooweither and Mahendra, Rahmad and Marivate, Vukosi and Panchenko, Alexander and Piper, Andrew and Ferreira, Charles Henrique Porto and Protasov, Vitaly and Rutunda, Samuel and Shrivastava, Manish and Udrea, Aura Cristina and Wanzare, Lilian Diana Awuor and Wu, Sophie and Wunderlich, Florian Valentin and Zhafran, Hanif Muhammad and Zhang, Tianhui and Zhou, Yi and Mohammad, Saif M.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
  month = jul,
  year = {2025},
  address = {Vienna, Austria},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.436/},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.436},
  pages = {8895--8916},
  isbn = {979-8-89176-251-0}
}

DiB

ZASCA-Sum: A Dataset of the South Africa Supreme Courts of Appeal Judgments and Media Summaries for Legal Documents Summarization Research

Idris Abdulmumin and Vukosi Marivate

Data in Brief, Jul 2025

DOI Bib

@article{ABDULMUMIN2025111567,
  title = {ZASCA-Sum: A Dataset of the South Africa Supreme Courts of Appeal Judgments and Media Summaries for Legal Documents Summarization Research},
  journal = {Data in Brief},
  pages = {111567},
  year = {2025},
  issn = {2352-3409},
  doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2025.111567},
  url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352340925002999},
  author = {Abdulmumin, Idris and Marivate, Vukosi}
}

Mach. Trans.

Tag-less back-translation

Idris Abdulmumin, Bashir Shehu Galadanci, and Garba Aliyu

Machine Translation, Dec 2021

DOI Bib

@article{Abdulmumin2021-tagless-mach-trans,
  doi = {10.1007/s10590-021-09284-y},
  year = {2021},
  month = dec,
  publisher = {Springer Science and Business Media {LLC}},
  volume = {35},
  number = {4},
  pages = {519--549},
  author = {Abdulmumin, Idris and Galadanci, Bashir Shehu and Aliyu, Garba},
  title = {Tag-less back-translation},
  journal = {Machine Translation},
  url = {https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10590-021-09284-y}
}

LREC

Hausa Visual Genome: A Dataset for Multi-Modal English to Hausa Machine Translation

Idris Abdulmumin, Satya Ranjan Dash, Musa Abdullahi Dawud, and 7 more authors

In Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Jun 2022

Bib

@inproceedings{abdulmumin-EtAl:2022:LREC,
  author = {Abdulmumin, Idris and Dash, Satya Ranjan and Dawud, Musa Abdullahi and Parida, Shantipriya and Muhammad, Shamsuddeen and Ahmad, Ibrahim Said and Panda, Subhadarshi and Bojar, Ond{\v{r}}ej and Galadanci, Bashir Shehu and Bello, Bello Shehu},
  title = {Hausa Visual Genome: A Dataset for Multi-Modal English to Hausa Machine Translation},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference},
  month = jun,
  year = {2022},
  address = {Marseille, France},
  publisher = {European Language Resources Association},
  pages = {6471--6479},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.694}
}

arXiv

AfriScience-MT: Towards Decolonizing Science in Africa through Text Translation

Idris Abdulmumin, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, and 11 more authors

Jun 2026

Bib

@misc{abdulmumin2026afriscience,
  title = {AfriScience-MT: Towards Decolonizing Science in Africa through Text Translation},
  author = {Abdulmumin, Idris and Gwadabe, Tajuddeen and Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan and Adelani, David Ifeoluwa and Khalo, Nomonde and Ahmad, Ibrahim Said and Modupe, Abiodun and Mumm, Anina and Biyela, Sibusiso and Rabie, Michelle and Havemann, Johanna and Rei, Marek and Abbott, Jade and Marivate, Vukosi},
  year = {2026},
  eprint = {2605.29741},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.CL},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29741}
}

arXiv

Temporal Simultaneity Predicts Annotation Quality in Sentiment Corpora

Idris Abdulmumin, Mokgadi Penelope Matloga, Tadesse Destaw Belay, and 5 more authors