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Hellina Hailu Nigatu

6 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

Cognate Detection for Historical Language Reconstruction of Proto-Sabean Languages: the Case of Ge’ez, Tigrinya, and Amharic

Elleni Sisay Temesgen, Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Fitsum Assamnew Andargie
COLING 2025main

As languages evolve, we risk losing ancestral languages. In this paper, we explore Historical Language Reconstruction (HLR) for Proto-Sabean languages, starting with the identification of cognates–sets of words in different related languages that are derived from the same ancestral language. We (1)…

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2025

Viability of Machine Translation for Healthcare in Low-Resourced Languages

Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Nikita Mehandru, Negasi Haile Abadi, Blen Gebremeskel, Ahmed Alaa, Monojit Choudhury
EMNLP 2025

Machine Translation errors in high-stakes settings like healthcare pose unique risks that could lead to clinical harm. The challenges are even more pronounced for low-resourced languages where human translators are scarce and MT tools perform poorly. In this work, we provide a taxonomy of Machine Tr

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2025

mRAKL: Multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Knowledge Graph Construction for Low-Resourced Languages

Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Min Li, Maartje Ter Hoeve, Saloni Potdar, Sarah Chasins
ACL 2025finding

Knowledge Graphs represent real-world entities and the relationships between them. Multilingual Knowledge Graph Construction (mKGC) refers to the task of automatically constructing or predicting missing entities and links for knowledge graphs in a multilingual setting. In this work, we reformulate t…

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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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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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