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Atnafu Lambebo Tonja

9 accepted papers

2025

A Case Against Implicit Standards: Homophone Normalization in Machine Translation for Languages that use the Ge’ez Script.

Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Henok Biadglign Ademtew, Hizkiel Mitiku Alemayehu, Negasi Haile Abadi, Tadesse Destaw Belay +1
EMNLP 2025

Homophone normalization–where characters that have the same sound in a writing script are mapped to one character–is a pre-processing step applied in Amharic Natural Language Processing (NLP) literature. While this may improve performance reported by automatic metrics, it also results in models that

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2025

CaMMT: Benchmarking Culturally Aware Multimodal Machine Translation

Emilio Villa-Cueva, Sholpan Bolatzhanova, Diana Turmakhan, Kareem Elzeky, Henok Biadglign Ademtew, Alham Fikri Aji +29
EMNLP 2025

Translating cultural content poses challenges for machine translation systems due to the differences in conceptualizations between cultures, where language alone may fail to convey sufficient context to capture region-specific meanings. In this work, we investigate whether images can act as cultural

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2025

The Esethu Framework: Reimagining Sustainable Dataset Governance and Curation for Low-Resource Languages

Jenalea Rajab, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Everlyn Asiko Chimoto, Dale Dunbar, Graham Morrissey, Fadel Thior +8
ACL 2025long

This paper presents the Esethu Framework, a sustainable data curation framework specifically designed to empower local communities and ensure equitable benefit-sharing from their linguistic resource. This framework is supported by the Esethu license, a novel community-centric data license. As a proo…

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2024

CVQA: Culturally-diverse Multilingual Visual Question Answering Benchmark

David Orlando Romero Mogrovejo, Chenyang Lyu, Haryo Akbarianto Wibowo, Santiago Góngora, Aishik Mandal, Sukannya Purkayastha +70
NeurIPS 2024oral

Visual Question Answering~(VQA) is an important task in multimodal AI, which requires models to understand and reason on knowledge present in visual and textual data. However, most of the current VQA datasets and models are primarily focused on English and a few major world languages, with images th…

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2024

EthioLLM: Multilingual Large Language Models for Ethiopian Languages with Task Evaluation

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Israel Abebe Azime, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Mesay Gemeda Yigezu, Moges Ahmed Ah Mehamed, Abinew Ali Ayele +6
COLING 2024main

Large language models (LLMs) have gained popularity recently due to their outstanding performance in various downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, low-resource languages are still lagging behind current state-of-the-art (SOTA) developments in the field of NLP due to insufficie…

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2024

The Zeno’s Paradox of ‘Low-Resource’ Languages

Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Benjamin Rosman, Thamar Solorio, Monojit Choudhury
EMNLP 2024main

The disparity in the languages commonly studied in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is typically reflected by referring to languages as low vs high-resourced. However, there is limited consensus on what exactly qualifies as a ‘low-resource language.’ To understand how NLP papers define and study ‘l…

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2024

Walia-LLM: Enhancing Amharic-LLaMA by Integrating Task-Specific and Generative Datasets

Israel Abebe Azime, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Mitiku Yohannes Fuge, Aman Kassahun Wassie, Eyasu Shiferaw Jada +3
EMNLP 2024finding

Large language models (LLMs) have received a lot of attention in natural language processing (NLP) research because of their exceptional performance in understanding and generating human languages. However, low-resource languages are left behind due to the unavailability of resources. In this work,…

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2023

Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering for African Languages

Odunayo Ogundepo, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Clara E. Rivera, Jonathan H. Clark, Sebastian Ruder, David Ifeoluwa Adelani +38
EMNLP 2023long findings

African languages have far less in-language content available digitally, making it challenging for question answering systems to satisfy the information needs of users. Cross-lingual open-retrieval question answering (XOR QA) systems -- those that retrieve answer content from other languages while s…

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2023

The Less the Merrier? Investigating Language Representation in Multilingual Models

Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Jugal Kalita
EMNLP 2023long findings

Multilingual Language Models offer a way to incorporate multiple languages in one model and utilize cross-language transfer learning to improve performance for different Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Despite progress in multilingual models, not all languages are supported as well, particu…

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