I build open datasets, models, and benchmarks that bring Natural Language Processing (machine translation, speech, and sentiment, emotion & safety analysis) to African and other low-resource languages.
I am a Research Associate at the University of Pretoria’s Data Science for Social Impact Research Group and Principal Investigator of AfriGemma (Advancing African Language NLP for Research, Healthcare, and Societal Benefit). I hold a PhD from Bayero University Kano, where I used domain awareness, quality estimation, and transfer learning to make better use of monolingual data for machine translation in low-resource languages.
My work covers LLM building, machine translation, sentiment and emotion analysis, semantic relatedness, hate and offensive speech, named-entity recognition, and sentence alignment. I collaborate with Masakhane, HausaNLP, LITHME, and the Open Language Data Initiative, and have co-organised the shared tasks AfriSenti 2023, SemRel 2024, BRIGHTER 2025, Dim-ABSA 2026, and POLAR 2026. I also teach NLP and mentor students and early-career researchers.
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. |
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| 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
- ACLBRIGHTER: BRIdging the Gap in Human-Annotated Textual Emotion Recognition Datasets for 28 LanguagesIn Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), Jul 2025
- LRECHausa Visual Genome: A Dataset for Multi-Modal English to Hausa Machine TranslationIn Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Jun 2022
- arXiv
- arXiv