David Ifeoluwa Adelani

David Ifeoluwa Adelani

An Assistant Professor at McGill University, Canada

About me

  • I am an Assistant Professor at McGill School of Computer Science, Canada a Core Academic Member at MILA, and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair (in 2024). . Previously, I was a DeepMind Academic Fellow at UCL, and I obtained a PhD in Computer Science at Saarland University. For more information, see my CV
  • My research focuses on multilingual NLP and Speech processing especially for low-resource languages. My PhD focused on NLP for African languages but now I am expanding to various regions of the world including South Asia, South-East Asia and Americas indigeneous languages. For more information on my research interests, see my Research Statement.
  • I will be recruiting 1-2 PhD students for fall 2026 (focus on multilinguality + post-training and VLMs for low-resource languages), if you are interested, please apply through MILA’s request for supervision (deadline Decemeber 1, 2025)

News

Students

Research interests

  • Machine learning
  • Multilingual NLP
    • NLP for low-resource languages
    • Machine translation
    • Multilingual representation learning
    • Large language model adaptation
  • Speech processing
    • Text-to-speech
    • Speech recognition
    • Speech representation learning
    • Speech translation
    • AudioLLMs
  • Vision Language Model
    • Multilingual VQA and reasoning
    • Multicultural understanding
    • Multilingual VLMs adaptation

Favourite Quote

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