David Ifeoluwa Adelani

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

Virginia Ceccatelli

Research Intern - McGill University

Blaise Cruz

Collaborating researcher - McGill University

PhD - McGill University

Yejin Jeon

Postdoctorate - McGill University

Gagan Jhajj

Research Intern - McGill University

Senyu Li Li

PhD - McGill University

Yinhan Lu

Research Intern - McGill University

Marie Maltais

PhD - McGill University

Damaris Stephanie NDJEBAYI

PhD - McGill University

Juhyun Oh

Research Intern - McGill University

Jessica Ojo

Master's Research - McGill University

Kosei Uemura

Research Intern - McGill University

Vivek Verma

Professional Master's - Université de Montréal

Tianyi Xu Xu

Research Intern - McGill University

Peter Yu

Master's Research - McGill University

Publications

XTREME-UP: A User-Centric Scarce-Data Benchmark for Under-Represented Languages

Sebastian Ruder

Jonathan H. Clark

Alexander Gutkin

Mihir Kale

Min Ma

Massimo Nicosia

Shruti Rijhwani

Parker Riley

Jean Michel Amath Sarr

Xinyi Wang

John Frederick Wieting

Nitish Gupta

Anna Katanova

Christo Kirov

Dana L Dickinson

Brian Roark

Bidisha Samanta

Connie Tao

Vera Axelrod … (see 7 more)

Isaac Rayburn Caswell

Colin Cherry

Dan Garrette

Reeve Ingle

Melvin Johnson

Dmitry Panteleev

Partha Talukdar

Data scarcity is a crucial issue for the development of highly multilingual NLP systems. Yet for many under-represented languages (ULs) -- l… (see more)anguages for which NLP re-search is particularly far behind in meeting user needs -- it is feasible to annotate small amounts of data. Motivated by this, we propose XTREME-UP, a benchmark defined by: its focus on the scarce-data scenario rather than zero-shot; its focus on user-centric tasks -- tasks with broad adoption by speakers of high-resource languages; and its focus on under-represented languages where this scarce-data scenario tends to be most realistic. XTREME-UP evaluates the capabilities of language models across 88 under-represented languages over 9 key user-centric technologies including ASR, OCR, MT, and information access tasks that are of general utility. We create new datasets for OCR, autocomplete, semantic parsing, and transliteration, and build on and refine existing datasets for other tasks. XTREME-UP provides methodology for evaluating many modeling scenarios including text-only, multi-modal (vision, audio, and text),supervised parameter tuning, and in-context learning. We evaluate commonly used models on the benchmark. We release all code and scripts to train and evaluate models

2023-11-30

Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (published)

Better Quality Pre-training Data and T5 Models for African Languages

Akintunde Oladipo

Mofetoluwa Adeyemi

Orevaoghene Ahia

Abraham Toluwase Owodunni

Odunayo Ogundepo

Jimmy Lin

In this study, we highlight the importance of enhancing the quality of pretraining data in multilingual language models. Existing web crawl… (see more)s have demonstrated quality issues, particularly in the context of low-resource languages. Consequently, we introduce a new multilingual pretraining corpus for

2023-10-06

EMNLP/2023/Conference (accepted)

Improving Language Plasticity via Pretraining with Active Forgetting

Yihong Chen

Kelly Marchisio

Roberta Raileanu

Pontus Stenetorp

Sebastian Riedel

Mikel Artetxe

Pretrained language models (PLMs) are today the primary model for natural language processing. Despite their impressive downstream performan… (see more)ce, it can be difficult to apply PLMs to new languages, a barrier to making their capabilities universally accessible. While prior work has shown it possible to address this issue by learning a new embedding layer for the new language, doing so is both data and compute inefficient. We propose to use an active forgetting mechanism during pretraining, as a simple way of creating PLMs that can quickly adapt to new languages. Concretely, by resetting the embedding layer every K updates during pretraining, we encourage the PLM to improve its ability of learning new embeddings within limited number of updates, similar to a meta-learning effect. Experiments with RoBERTa show that models pretrained with our forgetting mechanism not only demonstrate faster convergence during language adaptation, but also outperform standard ones in a low-data regime, particularly for languages that are distant from English. Code will be available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/language-model-plasticity.

2023-09-20

NeurIPS.cc/2023/Conference (poster)

YORC: Yoruba Reading Comprehension dataset

Aremu Anuoluwapo

Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi

In this paper, we create YORC: a new multi-choice Yoruba Reading Comprehension dataset that is based on Yoruba high-school reading comprehen… (see more)sion examination. We provide baseline results by performing cross-lingual transfer using existing English RACE dataset based on a pre-trained encoder-only model. Additionally, we provide results by prompting large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4.

2023-08-17

ArXiv (preprint)

Consultative engagement of stakeholders toward a roadmap for African language technologies

Kathleen Siminyu

Jade Abbott

Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún

Aremu Anuoluwapo

Blessing Kudzaishe Sibanda

Kofi Yeboah

Masabata Mokgesi-Selinga

Frederick R. Apina

Angela Thandizwe Mthembu

Arshath Ramkilowan

Babatunde Oladimeji

2023-07-31

Patterns (published)

NollySenti: Leveraging Transfer Learning and Machine Translation for Nigerian Movie Sentiment Classification

Iyanuoluwa Shode

Jing Peng

Anna Feldman

Africa has over 2000 indigenous languages but they are under-represented in NLP research due to lack of datasets. In recent years, there hav… (see more)e been progress in developing labelled corpora for African languages. However, they are often available in a single domain and may not generalize to other domains. In this paper, we focus on the task of sentiment classification for cross-domain adaptation. We create a new dataset, Nollywood movie reviews for five languages widely spoken in Nigeria (English, Hausa, Igbo, Nigerian Pidgin, and Yoruba). We provide an extensive empirical evaluation using classical machine learning methods and pre-trained language models. By leveraging transfer learning, we compare the performance of cross-domain adaptation from Twitter domain, and cross-lingual adaptation from English language. Our evaluation shows that transfer from English in the same target domain leads to more than 5% improvement in accuracy compared to transfer from Twitter in the same language. To further mitigate the domain difference, we leverage machine translation from English to other Nigerian languages, which leads to a further improvement of 7% over cross-lingual evaluation. While machine translation to low-resource languages are often of low quality, our analysis shows that sentiment related words are often preserved.

2023-05-17

ArXiv (preprint)

SemEval-2023 Task 12: Sentiment Analysis for African Languages (AfriSenti-SemEval)

Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad

Idris Abdulmumin

Seid Muhie Yimam

Ibrahim Ahmad

Nedjma OUSIDHOUM

Abinew Ayele

Saif Mohammad

Meriem Beloucif

2023-04-12

ArXiv (preprint)

Varepsilon kú mask: Integrating Yorùbá cultural greetings into machine translation

Idris Akinade

Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi

Clement Odoje

Dietrich Klakow

This paper investigates the performance of massively multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) systems in translating Yorùbá greetings… (see more) (kú mask), which are a big part of Yorùbá language and culture, into English. To evaluate these models, we present IkiniYorùbá, a Yorùbá-English translation dataset containing some Yorùbá greetings, and sample use cases. We analysed the performance of different multilingual NMT systems including Google and NLLB and show that these models struggle to accurately translate Yorùbá greetings into English. In addition, we trained a Yorùbá-English model by fine-tuning an existing NMT model on the training split of IkiniYorùbá and this achieved better performance when compared to the pre-trained multilingual NMT models, although they were trained on a large volume of data.

2023-03-30

ArXiv (preprint)

AfriMTE and AfriCOMET: Empowering COMET to Embrace Under-resourced African Languages

Jiayi Wang

Sweta Agrawal

Ricardo Rei

Eleftheria Briakou

Marine Carpuat

Marek Masiak

Xuanli He

Sofia Bourhim

Andiswa Bukula

Muhidin A. Mohamed

Temitayo Olatoye

Hamam Mokayed

Christine Mwase

Wangui Kimotho

Foutse Yuehgoh

Aremu Anuoluwapo

Jessica Ojo

Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad

Salomey Osei … (see 37 more)

Abdul-Hakeem Omotayo

Chiamaka Ijeoma Chukwuneke

Perez Ogayo

Oumaima Hourrane

Salma El Anigri

Lolwethu Ndolela

Thabiso Mangwana

Shafie Abdi Mohamed

Ayinde Hassan

Oluwabusayo Olufunke Awoyomi

Lama Alkhaled

sana Sabah al-azzawi

Naome Etori

Millicent Ochieng

Clemencia Siro

Samuel Njoroge

Eric Muchiri

Wangari Kimotho

Lyse Naomi Wamba

Daud Abolade

Simbiat Ajao

Tosin Adewumi

Iyanuoluwa Shode

Ricky Macharm

Ruqayya Nasir Iro

Saheed Salahudeen Abdullahi

Stephen Moore

Bernard Opoku

Zainab Akinjobi

Abeeb Afolabi

Nnaemeka Casmir Obiefuna

Onyekachi Ogbu

Sam Brian

Verrah Akinyi Otiende

CHINEDU EMMANUEL MBONU

Toadoum Sari Sakayo

Pontus Stenetorp

Despite the progress we have recorded in scaling multilingual machine translation (MT) models and evaluation data to several under-resourced… (see more) African languages, it is difficult to measure accurately the progress we have made on these languages because evaluation is often performed on n -gram matching metrics like BLEU that often have worse correlation with human judgments. Embedding-based metrics such as COMET correlate better; however, lack of evaluation data with human ratings for under-resourced languages, complexity of annotation guidelines like Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), and limited language coverage of multilingual encoders have hampered their applicability to African languages. In this paper, we address these challenges by creating high-quality human evaluation data with a simplified MQM guideline for error-span annotation and direct assessment (DA) scoring for 13 typologi-cally diverse African languages. Furthermore, we develop A FRI COMET—a COMET evaluation metric for African languages by leveraging DA training data from high-resource languages and African-centric multilingual encoder (AfroXLM-Roberta) to create the state-of-the-art evaluation metric for African languages MT with respect to Spearman-rank correlation with human judgments ( +0 . 406 ).

2022-12-31

arXiv.org (preprint)

AfriSenti: A Twitter Sentiment Analysis Benchmark for African Languages

Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad

Idris Abdulmumin

Abinew Ayele

Nedjma OUSIDHOUM

Seid Muhie Yimam

Ibrahim Ahmad

Meriem Beloucif

Saif Mohammad

Sebastian Ruder

Oumaima Hourrane

Alipio Jorge

Pavel Brazdil

Felermino Ali

Davis David

Salomey Osei

Bello Shehu-Bello

Falalu Lawan

Tajuddeen Gwadabe

Samuel Rutunda … (see 7 more)

Tadesse Belay

Wendimu Baye Messelle

Hailu Balcha

Sisay Adugna Chala

Hagos Gebremichael

Bernard Opoku

Stephen Arthur

2022-12-31

EMNLP (published)

Findings of the 1st Shared Task on Multi-lingual Multi-task Information Retrieval at MRL 2023

Francesco Tinner

Chris Emezue

Mammad Hajili

Omer Goldman

Muhammad Farid Adilazuarda

Muhammad Dehan Al Kautsar

Aziza Mirsaidova

Müge Kural

Dylan Massey

Chiamaka Ijeoma Chukwuneke

CHINEDU EMMANUEL MBONU

Damilola Oluwaseun Oloyede

Kayode Olaleye

Jonathan Atala

Benjamin A. Ajibade

Saksham Bassi

Rahul Aralikatte

Najoung Kim

Duygu Ataman

Large language models (LLMs) excel in language understanding and generation, especially in English which has ample public benchmarks for var… (see more)ious natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Nevertheless, their reliability across different languages and domains remains uncertain. Our new shared task introduces a novel benchmark to assess the ability of multilingual LLMs to comprehend and produce language under sparse settings, particularly in scenarios with under-resourced languages, with an emphasis on the ability to capture logical, factual, or causal relationships within lengthy text contexts. The shared task consists of two sub-tasks crucial to information retrieval: Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Reading Comprehension (RC), in 7 data-scarce languages: Azerbaijani, Igbo, Indonesian, Swiss German, Turkish, Uzbek and Yorùbá, which previously lacked annotated resources in information retrieval tasks. Our evaluation of leading LLMs reveals that, despite their competitive performance, they still have notable weaknesses such as producing output in the non-target language or providing counterfactual information that cannot be inferred from the context. As more advanced models emerge, the benchmark will remain essential for supporting fairness and applicability in information retrieval systems.

2022-12-31

MRL (published)

MasakhaNEWS: News Topic Classification for African languages

Marek Masiak

Israel Abebe Azime

Jesujoba Alabi

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja

Christine Mwase

Odunayo Ogundepo

Bonaventure F. P. Dossou

Akintunde Oladipo

Doreen Nixdorf

Chris Chinenye Emezue

sana al-azzawi

Blessing Sibanda

Davis David

Lolwethu Ndolela

Jonathan Mukiibi

Tunde Ajayi

Tatiana Moteu

Brian Odhiambo

Abraham Owodunni … (see 42 more)

Nnaemeka Obiefuna

Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad

Saheed Abdullahi Salahudeen

Mesay Gemeda Yigezu

Tajuddeen Gwadabe

Idris Abdulmumin

Mahlet Taye

Oluwabusayo Awoyomi

Iyanuoluwa Shode

Tolulope Adelani

Habiba Abdulganiyu

Abdul-Hakeem Omotayo

Adetola Adeeko

Anuoluwapo Aremu

Olanrewaju Samuel

Clemencia Siro

Wangari Kimotho

Onyekachi Ogbu

Chinedu Mbonu

Chiamaka Chukwuneke

Samuel Fanijo

Jessica Ojo

Oyinkansola Awosan

Tadesse Kebede

Toadoum Sari Sakayo

Pamela Nyatsine

Freedmore Sidume

Oreen Yousuf

Mardiyyah Oduwole

Ussen Kimanuka

Kanda Patrick Tshinu

Thina Diko

Siyanda Nxakama

Abdulmejid Johar

Sinodos Nigusse

Muhidin Mohamed

Shafie Mohamed

Fuad Mire Hassan

Moges Ahmed Mehamed

Evrard Ngabire

Pontus Stenetorp

African languages are severely under-represented in NLP research due to lack of datasets covering several NLP tasks. While there are individ… (see more)ual language specific datasets that are being expanded to different tasks, only a handful of NLP tasks (e.g. named entity recognition and machine translation) have standardized benchmark datasets covering several geographical and typologically-diverse African languages. In this paper, we develop MasakhaNEWS -- a new benchmark dataset for news topic classification covering 16 languages widely spoken in Africa. We provide an evaluation of baseline models by training classical machine learning models and fine-tuning several language models. Furthermore, we explore several alternatives to full fine-tuning of language models that are better suited for zero-shot and few-shot learning such as cross-lingual parameter-efficient fine-tuning (like MAD-X), pattern exploiting training (PET), prompting language models (like ChatGPT), and prompt-free sentence transformer fine-tuning (SetFit and Cohere Embedding API). Our evaluation in zero-shot setting shows the potential of prompting ChatGPT for news topic classification in low-resource African languages, achieving an average performance of 70 F1 points without leveraging additional supervision like MAD-X. In few-shot setting, we show that with as little as 10 examples per label, we achieved more than 90\% (i.e. 86.0 F1 points) of the performance of full supervised training (92.6 F1 points) leveraging the PET approach.

2022-12-31

AfricaNLP (published)