David Ifeoluwa Adelani

henok.ademtew@mila.quebec

Biography

David Adelani is an assistant professor at McGill University’s School of Computer Science under the Fighting Inequities initiative, and a core academic member of Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute.

Adelani’s research focuses on multilingual natural language processing with special attention to under-resourced languages.

Current Students

Henok Ademtew

Master's Research - McGill University

Master's Research - McGill University

victor.akinode@mila.quebec

virginia.ceccatelli@mila.quebec

Virginia Ceccatelli

Collaborating researcher - McGill University

luel.hagos-beyene@mila.quebec

David Guzmán Ramírez

PhD - McGill University

david.guzman@mila.quebec

Research Intern - McGill University

Research Intern - McGill University

nicolas.helmeyer@mila.quebec

Yejin Jeon

Postdoctorate - McGill University

yejin.jeon@mila.quebec

Senyu Li Li

PhD - McGill University

senyu.li@mila.quebec

Mona Liu

Research Intern - McGill University

mona.liu@mila.quebec

marie.maltais@mila.quebec

Yinhan Lu

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Bang Liu

yinhan.lu@mila.quebec

PhD - McGill University

damaris-stephanie.ndjebayi@mila.quebec

Damaris Stephanie NDJEBAYI

PhD - McGill University

Tolúlọpẹ Ògúnrẹ̀mí

Research Intern - Standford University

tolulope.ogunremi@mila.quebec

Juhyun Oh

Collaborating Alumni - McGill University

juhyun.oh@mila.quebec

alessio.tosolini@mila.quebec

Jessica Ojo

Master's Research - McGill University

jessica.ojo@mila.quebec

Research Intern - McGill University

pablo.tellez@mila.quebec

Alessio Tosolini

Research Intern - McGill University

Kosei Uemura

Research Intern - McGill University

kosei.uemura@mila.quebec

Vivek Verma

Professional Master's - Université de Montréal

vivek.verma@mila.quebec

Jessica Wang

Research Intern - McGill University

jessica.wang@mila.quebec

Tianyou Xie

Research Intern - McGill University

tianyou.xie@mila.quebec

Tianyi Xu Xu

Research Intern - McGill University

tiany12138@gmail.com

Peter Yu

Collaborating Alumni - McGill University

Publications

AfriqueLLM: How Data Mixing and Model Architecture Impact Continued Pre-training for African Languages

Hao Yu

Tianyi Xu

Michael A. Hedderich

Wassim Hamidouche

Syed Waqas Zamir

2026-01-09

ArXiv (preprint)

Afri-MCQA: Multimodal Cultural Question Answering for African Languages

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja

Srija Anand

Emilio Villa Cueva

Israel Abebe Azime

Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi

Muhidin A. Mohamed

Debela Desalegn Yadeta

Negasi Haile Abadi

Abigail Oppong

Nnaemeka Casmir Obiefuna

Idris Abdulmumin

Naome Etori

Eric Peter Wairagala

Kanda Patrick Tshinu

Imanigirimbabazi Emmanuel

Gabofetswe Malema

Alham Fikri Aji

Thamar Solorio

Africa is home to over one-third of the world's languages, yet remains underrepresented in AI research. We introduce Afri-MCQA, the first Mu… (see more)ltilingual Cultural Question-Answering benchmark covering 7.5k Q&A pairs across 15 African languages from 12 countries. The benchmark offers parallel English-African language Q&A pairs across text and speech modalities and was entirely created by native speakers. Benchmarking large language models (LLMs) on Afri-MCQA shows that open-weight models perform poorly across evaluated cultures, with near-zero accuracy on open-ended VQA when queried in native language or speech. To evaluate linguistic competence, we include control experiments meant to assess this specific aspect separate from cultural knowledge, and we observe significant performance gaps between native languages and English for both text and speech. These findings underscore the need for speech-first approaches, culturally grounded pretraining, and cross-lingual cultural transfer. To support more inclusive multimodal AI development in African languages, we release our Afri-MCQA under academic license or CC BY-NC 4.0 on HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/datasets/Atnafu/Afri-MCQA)

2026-01-08

ArXiv (preprint)

Ibom NLP: A Step Toward Inclusive Natural Language Processing for Nigeria's Minority Languages

Oluwadara Kalejaiye

Luel Hagos Beyene

Mmekut-Mfon Gabriel Edet

A. D. Akpan

Eno-Abasi Urua

Anietie U Andy

2025-11-08

ArXiv (preprint)

AFRIDOC-MT: Document-level MT Corpus for African Languages

Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi

Israel Abebe Azime

Miaoran Zhang

Cristina España-Bonet

Rachel Bawden

Dawei Zhu

Clement Odoje

Idris Akinade

Iffat Maab

Davis David

Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad

Neo Putini

David O. Ademuyiwa

Andrew Caines

Dietrich Klakow

This paper introduces AFRIDOC-MT, a document-level multi-parallel translation dataset covering English and five African languages: Amharic, … (see more)Hausa, Swahili, Yor\`ub\'a, and Zulu. The dataset comprises 334 health and 271 information technology news documents, all human-translated from English to these languages. We conduct document-level translation benchmark experiments by evaluating neural machine translation (NMT) models and large language models (LLMs) for translations between English and these languages, at both the sentence and pseudo-document levels. These outputs are realigned to form complete documents for evaluation. Our results indicate that NLLB-200 achieved the best average performance among the standard NMT models, while GPT-4o outperformed general-purpose LLMs. Fine-tuning selected models led to substantial performance gains, but models trained on sentences struggled to generalize effectively to longer documents. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that some LLMs exhibit issues such as under-generation, repetition of words or phrases, and off-target translations, especially for African languages.

2025-10-31

Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (published)

Charting the Landscape of African NLP: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Ahead

Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi

Michael A. Hedderich

Dietrich Klakow

2025-10-31

Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (published)