Portrait de David Ifeoluwa Adelani

David Ifeoluwa Adelani

Membre académique principal
Chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR
McGill University
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage de représentations
Apprentissage profond
Traitement de la parole
Traitement du langage naturel

Biographie

David Adelani est professeur adjoint en science informatique et lutte contre les inégalités à l’Université McGill, et membre académique principal à Mila – Institut québécois d'intelligence artificielle. Ses recherches se concentrent sur le traitement multilingue du langage naturel, avec un accent particulier sur les langues sous-dotées en ressources.

Étudiants actuels

Stagiaire de recherche - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Stagiaire de recherche - McGill
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill
Maîtrise professionnelle - UdeM
Maîtrise recherche - McGill

Publications

mSTEB: Massively Multilingual Evaluation of LLMs on Speech and Text Tasks
Luel Hagos Beyene
Vivek Verma
Min Ma
Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi
Fabian David Schmidt
Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende
Large Language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on a wide range of tasks, including in multimodal settings such as spe… (voir plus)ech. However, their evaluation is often limited to English and a few high-resource languages. For low-resource languages, there is no standardized evaluation benchmark. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing mSTEB, a new benchmark to evaluate the performance of LLMs on a wide range of tasks covering language identification, text classification, question answering, and translation tasks on both speech and text modalities. We evaluated the performance of leading LLMs such as Gemini 2.0 Flash and GPT-4o (Audio) and state-of-the-art open models such as Qwen 2 Audio and Gemma 3 27B. Our evaluation shows a wide gap in performance between high-resource and low-resource languages, especially for languages spoken in Africa and Americas/Oceania. Our findings show that more investment is needed to address their under-representation in LLMs coverage.
mSTEB: Massively Multilingual Evaluation of LLMs on Speech and Text Tasks
Luel Hagos Beyene
Vivek Verma
Min Ma
Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi
Fabian David Schmidt
Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende
Large Language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on a wide range of tasks, including in multimodal settings such as spe… (voir plus)ech. However, their evaluation is often limited to English and a few high-resource languages. For low-resource languages, there is no standardized evaluation benchmark. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing mSTEB, a new benchmark to evaluate the performance of LLMs on a wide range of tasks covering language identification, text classification, question answering, and translation tasks on both speech and text modalities. We evaluated the performance of leading LLMs such as Gemini 2.0 Flash and GPT-4o (Audio) and state-of-the-art open models such as Qwen 2 Audio and Gemma 3 27B. Our evaluation shows a wide gap in performance between high-resource and low-resource languages, especially for languages spoken in Africa and Americas/Oceania. Our findings show that more investment is needed to address their under-representation in LLMs coverage.
SSA-COMET: Do LLMs Outperform Learned Metrics in Evaluating MT for Under-Resourced African Languages?
Senyu Li
Jiayi Wang
Felermino Dario Mario Ali
Colin Cherry
Daniel Deutsch
Eleftheria Briakou
Rui Sousa-Silva
Henrique Lopes Cardoso
Pontus Stenetorp
Evaluating machine translation (MT) quality for under-resourced African languages remains a significant challenge, as existing metrics often… (voir plus) suffer from limited language coverage and poor performance in low-resource settings. While recent efforts, such as AfriCOMET, have addressed some of the issues, they are still constrained by small evaluation sets, a lack of publicly available training data tailored to African languages, and inconsistent performance in extremely low-resource scenarios. In this work, we introduce SSA-MTE, a large-scale human-annotated MT evaluation (MTE) dataset covering 13 African language pairs from the News domain, with over 63,000 sentence-level annotations from a diverse set of MT systems. Based on this data, we develop SSA-COMET and SSA-COMET-QE, improved reference-based and reference-free evaluation metrics. We also benchmark prompting-based approaches using state-of-the-art LLMs like GPT-4o and Claude. Our experimental results show that SSA-COMET models significantly outperform AfriCOMET and are competitive with the strongest LLM (Gemini 2.5 Pro) evaluated in our study, particularly on low-resource languages such as Twi, Luo, and Yoruba. All resources are released under open licenses to support future research.
SSA-COMET: Do LLMs Outperform Learned Metrics in Evaluating MT for Under-Resourced African Languages?
Senyu Li
Jiayi Wang
Felermino Dario Mario Ali
Colin Cherry
Daniel Deutsch
Eleftheria Briakou
Rui Sousa-Silva
Henrique Lopes Cardoso
Pontus Stenetorp
Evaluating machine translation (MT) quality for under-resourced African languages remains a significant challenge, as existing metrics often… (voir plus) suffer from limited language coverage and poor performance in low-resource settings. While recent efforts, such as AfriCOMET, have addressed some of the issues, they are still constrained by small evaluation sets, a lack of publicly available training data tailored to African languages, and inconsistent performance in extremely low-resource scenarios. In this work, we introduce SSA-MTE, a large-scale human-annotated MT evaluation (MTE) dataset covering 13 African language pairs from the News domain, with over 63,000 sentence-level annotations from a diverse set of MT systems. Based on this data, we develop SSA-COMET and SSA-COMET-QE, improved reference-based and reference-free evaluation metrics. We also benchmark prompting-based approaches using state-of-the-art LLMs like GPT-4o and Claude. Our experimental results show that SSA-COMET models significantly outperform AfriCOMET and are competitive with the strongest LLM (Gemini 2.5 Pro) evaluated in our study, particularly on low-resource languages such as Twi, Luo, and Yoruba. All resources are released under open licenses to support future research.
Charting the Landscape of African NLP: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Ahead
Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi
Michael A. Hedderich
Dietrich Klakow
Improving Multilingual Math Reasoning for African Languages
Odunayo Ogundepo
Akintunde Oladipo
Kelechi Ogueji
Esther Adenuga
Jimmy Lin
Researchers working on low-resource languages face persistent challenges due to limited data availability and restricted access to computati… (voir plus)onal resources. Although most large language models (LLMs) are predominantly trained in high-resource languages, adapting them to low-resource contexts, particularly African languages, requires specialized techniques. Several strategies have emerged for adapting models to low-resource languages in todays LLM landscape, defined by multi-stage pre-training and post-training paradigms. However, the most effective approaches remain uncertain. This work systematically investigates which adaptation strategies yield the best performance when extending existing LLMs to African languages. We conduct extensive experiments and ablation studies to evaluate different combinations of data types (translated versus synthetically generated), training stages (pre-training versus post-training), and other model adaptation configurations. Our experiments focuses on mathematical reasoning tasks, using the Llama 3.1 model family as our base model.
The NaijaVoices Dataset: Cultivating Large-Scale, High-Quality, Culturally-Rich Speech Data for African Languages
Chris Emezue
The NaijaVoices Community
Busayo Awobade
Abraham Owodunni
Handel Emezue
Gloria Monica Tobechukwu Emezue
N. N. Emezue
Sewade Ogun
Bunmi Akinremi
Lugha-Llama: Adapting Large Language Models for African Languages
Happy Buzaaba
Alexander Wettig
Christiane Fellbaum
Does Generative AI speak Nigerian-Pidgin?: Issues about Representativeness and Bias for Multilingualism in LLMs
A. Seza Doğruöz
Iyanuoluwa Shode
Aremu Anuoluwapo
Lugha-Llama: Adapting Large Language Models for African Languages
Happy Buzaaba
Alexander Wettig
Christiane Fellbaum
SemEval-2025 Task 11: Bridging the Gap in Text-Based Emotion Detection
Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad
Nedjma OUSIDHOUM
Idris Abdulmumin
Seid Muhie Yimam
Jan Philip Wahle
Terry Lima Ruas
Meriem Beloucif
Christine de Kock
Tadesse Belay
Ibrahim Ahmad
Nirmal Surange
Daniela Teodorescu
Alham Fikri Aji
Felermino Ali
Vladimir Araujo
Abinew Ayele
Oana Ignat
Alexander Panchenko
Yi Zhou … (voir 1 de plus)
Saif M. Mohammad
SemEval-2025 Task 11: Bridging the Gap in Text-Based Emotion Detection
Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad
Nedjma OUSIDHOUM
Idris Abdulmumin
Seid Muhie Yimam
Jan Philip Wahle
Terry Lima Ruas
Meriem Beloucif
Christine de Kock
Tadesse Belay
Ibrahim Ahmad
Nirmal Surange
Daniela Teodorescu
Alham Fikri Aji
Felermino Ali
Vladimir Araujo
Abinew Ayele
Oana Ignat
Alexander Panchenko
Yi Zhou … (voir 1 de plus)
Saif M. Mohammad