• I hold a PhD in Computer Science from the Saarland University, Germany, where I was advised by Prof. Dr. Dietrich Klakow. My research focused on advancing natural language processing for African languages in this Era of LLMs.
• I have obtained my MSc degree in Computer Science from Saarland University. My thesis focused on enriching self supervised neural machine translation using phrases.
• My research interests lie in the general area of natural language processing (NLP), particularly in NLP for low resource languages, Neural Machine Translation (NMT), Information Extraction, Question Answering Systems and Representation Learning.
• I received my Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from Bowen University, Nigeria. My undergraduate research advisors are Dr. O.O. Adeosun and Dr. O.A. Ibitoye.

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News

• I successfully defended my PhD thesis “Advancing African NLP: Adaptation, Analysis, and Evaluation of Large Language Models”. (17.08.2026)
• Our recent paper, “Saar-Voice: A Multi-Speaker Saarbrücken Dialect Speech Corpus”, was featured in an interview on Saarländischer Rundfunk. The interview with first author Lena Oberkircher discussed about the paper. (28.05.2026)
• I gave a seminar at the Transducens research group, Universitat d’Alacant, 🇪🇸, titled “African NLP Across Scales: Models, Culture, and Documents”, presenting recent work from my research. (21.05.2026)
• I gave a seminar at HiTZ zentroa in San Sebastián, 🇪🇸, titled “Scaling and Evaluating Large Language Models for African Languages”, presenting recent work from my research. (18.05.2026)
• I attended LREC 2026 in Mallorca, 🇪🇸, where I presented Uhura and YoNER as oral talks, while Italian Arias and Saar-Voice were presented by their lead authors. (14.05.2026)
• I gave an invited talk titled “Building NLP for African Languages: Challenges and Opportunities” at the Department of Linguistics (Faculty of Arts), University of Ibadan, 🇳🇬 (08.04.2026)
• I submitted my PhD thesis titled “Advancing African NLP: Adaptation, Analysis, and Evaluation of Large Language Models” (19.03.2026)
• I attended the LowResNLP 2025 Workshop (colocated with RANLP 2025) in Varna, 🇧🇬, and gave an keynote talk titled “Bridging the Gap: Low-Resource NLP for African Languages “ (13.09.2025)
• I gave a guest lecture (online) on “Neural Machine Translation” at the University of Ibadan, 🇳🇬 (03.09.2025)
• I gave an invited talk titled “Adaptation at Scale: Making Multilingual Models Work for Underrepresented Languages” at the 2025 Erasmus LCT Summer School, 🇩🇪 (26.08.2025)
• I attended Interspeech 2025 in Rotterdam, 🇳🇱, and presented a poster of our paper “ AfriHuBERT” (21.08.2025)
• I attended the AfricaNLP 2025 Workshop: Multilingual and Multicultural-aware LLMs in Vienna, 🇦🇹, and gave an keynote talk titled “Mapping Progress in African NLP” (31.07.2025)
• I attended the HumanCLAIM Workshop: The Human Perspective on Cross-Lingual AI Models in Göttingen, 🇩🇪 from 26th to 27th March, 2025
• I was at the NII Yamagishi Lab, Tokyo 🇯🇵 for a short research visit (22.01.2025-28.02.2025)
• I attended the GCND doctoral school/hackathon titled GCND Hackathon: Automatic linguistic annotation and speech recognition of dialects in Ghent, 🇧🇪 from 7th to 9th October, 2024
• I attended the Athens NLP 2024 Summer School in Greece, 🇬🇷 from 19th to 25th September, 2024
• Our paper UNIQORN: Unified Question Answering over RDF Knowledge Graphs and Natural Language Text (with Soumajit Pramanik, et al.) has been accepted at Journal of Web Semantics (05.09.2024)
• I completed my time at the NII Yamagishi Lab, Tokyo (29.08.2024)
• Our paper AAdaM at SemEval-2024 Task 1: Augmentation and Adaptation for Multilingual Semantic Textual Relatedness won the best system description paper ward at SemEval Workshop 2024 🏆 (21.06.2024)
• Our paper The Impact of Demonstrations on Multilingual In-Context Learning: A Multidimensional Analysis (with Miaoran Zhang, et al.) has been accepted at ACL 2024 (16.06.2024)
• Our paper The Hidden Space of Transformer Language Adapter (with Marius Mosbach, Matan Eyal, Dietrich Klakow, and Mor Geva) has been accepted at ACL 2024 (16.06.2024)
• I resumed as a research intern at the NII Yamagishi Lab, Tokyo for 3 months internship (08.06.2024)
• Our paper AAdaM at SemEval-2024 Task 1: Augmentation and Adaptation for Multilingual Semantic Textual Relatedness (with Miaoran Zhang, Mingyang Wang, and, Dietrich Klakow has been accepted at SemEval Workshop 2024 (19.03.2024)
• I attended EMNLP 2023 in singapore, 🇸🇬 from 5th to 11th December, 2023, I also presented a poster at BlackboxNLP colocated with EMNLP
• I attended AfricAI Conference in Kigali, 🇷🇼 from 12th to 14th June, 2023
• Our paper Adapting Pre-trained Language Models to African Languages via Multilingual Adaptive Fine-Tuning won the best paper award in the Grand Challenge KISTI category at COLING 2022 🏆 (14.10.2022)
• Our system description paper Inria-ALMAnaCH at WMT 2022: Does Transcription Help Cross-Script Machine Translation? (with Lydia Nishimwe, Benjamin Muller, Camille Rey, Benoît Sagot, and Rachel Bawden) has been accepted at WMT 2022 (11.10.2022)
• Our system description paper Separating Grains from the Chaff: Using Data Filtering to Improve Multilingual Translation for Low-Resourced African Languages (with Idris Abdulmumin, Michael Beukman, Chris Emezue, and 7 others) has been accepted at WMT 2022 (11.10.2022)
• Our paper Adapting Pre-trained Language Models to African Languages via Multilingual Adaptive Fine-Tuning (with David Adelani, Marius Mosbach and Dietrich Klakow) has been accepted at COLING 2022 (16.08.2022)
• Our paper Few-Shot Pidgin Text Adaptation via Contrastive Fine-Tuning (with Ernie Chang, David Adelani, and Vera Demberg) has been accepted at COLING 2022 (16.08.2022)
• I resumed as a Ph.D. student and researcher at the Spoken Language Systems (LSV) group, Saarland University (20.06.2022)
• Our paper BibleTTS: a large, high-fidelity, multilingual, and uniquely African speech corpus (with Josh Meyer, David Adelani, Edresson Casanova, Alp Öktem, Daniel Whitenack Julian Weber, Salomon Kabongo, Elizabeth Salesky, Iroro Orife, Colin Leong, Perez Ogayo, Chris Emezue, Jonathan Mukiibi, Salomey Osei, Apelete Agbolo, Victor Akinode, Bernard Opoku, Samuel Olanrewaju, and Shamsuddeen Muhammad) has been accepted at Interspeech 2022 (15.06.2022)
• I left my position as a research engineer at the ALMAnaCH project-team, INRIA Paris (14.06.2022)
• Our paper A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way! Leveraging Pre-trained Models for African News Translation (with David Adelani, Angela Fan, Julia Kreutzer, Xiaoyu Shen, Machel Reid, Dana Ruiter, Dietrich Klakow, Peter Nabende, Ernie Chang, and others) has been accepted at NAACL-HLT 2022 (21.04.2022)
• I resumed as a research engineer at the ALMAnaCH project-team, INRIA Paris (01.02.2022)
• I completed my internsip at the Databases and Information Systems Group, MPI-INF (31.01.2022)
• Our submission for WMT2021 shared task EdinSaar@WMT21: North-Germanic Low-Resource Multilingual NMT (with Svetlana Tchistiakova, Koel Dutta Chowdhury, Sourav Dutta, Dana Ruiter) has been accepted at WMT 2021 (07.09.2021)
• I submitted my masters thesis titled Phrase-enriched self supervised neural machine translation. (15.07.2021)
• Our paper The Effect of Domain and Diacritics in Yorùbá-English Neural Machine Translation (with David Adelani, Dana Ruiter, Damilola Adebonojo, Adesina Ayeni, Mofe Adeyemi, Ayodele Awokoya, and Cristina España-Bonet) has been accepted at MT Summit (Research Track) (15.06.2021)
• Our paper MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African Languages (with David 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 Muhammad, Chris Chinenye Emezue, Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende, Perez Ogayo, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Catherine Gitau, Derguene Mbaye, Seid Muhie Yimam, and 40 more authors) has been accepted at the Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL) 2021 (14.06.2021)
• I took the first place (#1) in the AI4D Takwimu Lab - Machine Translation Challenge organized by Zindi. (25.06.2021)
• Our paper MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African Languages (with David 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 Muhammad, Chris Chinenye Emezue, Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende, Perez Ogayo, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Catherine Gitau, Derguene Mbaye, Seid Muhie Yimam, and 40 more authors) has been accepted at AfricaNLP workshop at EACL 2021 (04.03.2021)
• Our paper MENYO-20k: A Multi-domain English-Yorùbá Corpus for Machine Translation and Domain Adaptation (with David Adelani, Dana Ruiter, Damilola Adebonojo, Adesina Ayeni, Mofe Adeyemi, Ayodele Awokoya, and Cristina España-Bonet) has been accepted at AfricaNLP workshop at EACL 2021 (04.03.2021)
• Our submission for WMT2020 shared task UdS-DFKI@WMT20: Unsupervised MT and Very Low Resource Supervised MT for German↔Upper Sorbian (with Sourav Dutta, Saptarashmi Bandyopadhyay, Dana Ruiter, and Josef van Genabith) has been accepted at WMT 2020 (30.09.2020)
• Our paper Transfer Learning and Distant Supervision for Multilingual Transformer Models: A Study on African Languages (with Michael A. Hedderich, David I. Adelani, Dawei Zhu, Udia Markus, and Dietrich Klakow) has been accepted at EMNLP 2020 (short paper) (15.09.2020)
• I presented our paper “Massive vs. Curated Word Embeddings for Low-Resourced Languages. The Case of Yorùbá and Twi at the Data Science for Society Seminar, Univ. of Pretoria (fully virtual) 04.09.2020
• I resumed as a student research assistant at the Databases and Information Systems Group, MPI-INF (01.09.2020)
• I attended the 10th Lisbon Machine Learning School (fully virtual on-line school due to COVID-19) July 21st to July 29th, 2020
• I presented the talk titled “Yorùbá and beyond: NLP from an African perspective” at the first event of the free AI4D Africa Webinar Series. (02.07.2020)
• Our paper “Massive vs. Curated Word Embeddings for Low-Resourced Languages. The Case of Yorùbá and Twi (with Kwabena Amponsah-Kaakyire, David I. Adelani and Cristina España-Bonet) has been accepted at the 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020) (11.02.2020)
• Attended Neurips 2019 @Vancouver, great experience, thank you Black in AI and her sponsors! (December 8 - 14, 2019)
• Our poster “Investigating the quality of pre-trained wordembeddings in Yorùbá, a low-resource Language” was accepted (04.09.2019) and presented at the 2019 Black in AI workshop (co-located with Neurips 2019) 08.12.2019
• Resumed as a Research Assistant at the Multilinguality and Language Technology Group, DFKI (15.11.2019)
• I moved to Saarland University, Germany for my Masters in Computer Science Program (12.10.2018)