• I am an Assistant Professor at McGill School of Computer Science, Canada and a Core Academic Member at MILA, and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair (in 2024). I will be recruiting MSc/PhD students for fall 2025, if you are interested, please apply through MILA’s request for supervision (deadline Decemeber 1, 2024)
• I was formely a Research Fellow (or DeepMind Academic Fellow) at University College London, UK, collaborating with the UCL NLP Group.
• I was formely a PhD Student at the Spoken Language Systems group, Saarland University, Saarland Informatics Campus. I was privileged to be supervised by Prof. Dr. Dietrich Klakow.
• I obtained an MSc in Computer Science from the African University of Science and Technology, Abuja advised by Prof. Mamadou Kaba Traoré, and a BSc in Computer Science from the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, Nigeria advised by Prof. Adesina Sodiya

News

• 3 paper accepted at EMNLP 2024: MINERS, MT Hallucination Detection and YORÙLECT
• 1 paper accepted at NAACL 2024: AfriMTE & AfriCOMET
• 2 papers accepted at LREC-COLING 2024: ÌròyìnSpeech and Mitigating Translationese in Low-resource Languages
• 1 paper accepted at EACL 2024: SIB-200
• 4 papers accepted at EMNLP 2023: AfriSenti, AfriTeVa V2, AfriQA, XTREME-UP
• 1 paper accepted at NeurIPS 2023: Improving Language Plasticity via Pretraining with Active Forgetting
• 1 paper accepted at AACL 2023: MasakhaNEWS
• 3 papers accepted at ACL 2023: MasakhaPOS, NollySenti, BLOOM+1
• 1 paper accepted at C3NLP Workshop at EACL 2023: Ẹ KU [MASK]
• 4 papers accepted at AfricaNLP Worshop 2023: Ẹ KU [MASK], MasakhaNEWS, AfriSenti, and MphayaNER

Students

• PhD students:
  • Senyu Li: 2024 -
• MSc students:
  • Jessica Ojo: 2024 -
  • Hao Yu: 2024 -
• Interns:
  • Fabian David Schmidt (PhD student at University of Würzburg): Sep 2024 -

Research interests

• Machine learning
• Multilingual NLP
  • NLP for low-resource languages
  • Machine translation
  • Multilingual representation learning
  • Cross-lingual transfer learning
• Speech processing
  • Text-to-speech
  • Speech recognition
  • Speech representation learning
  • Speech translation

Favourite Quote

“Anything you find your hands doing, do it with all your might” (since 2006)