About me

I am an associate research scholar at PLI in the Princeton AI Lab, I am also affiliated with the Princeton CDH, AWI and the AHC. My work focuses on multilingual NLP for low-resource languages especially African languages. Before that, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the RIKEN Centre for Advanced Intelligence Project, in the Adaptive Bayesian Intelligence Lab where I spent time investigating the use of natural-gradient Bayesian methods to improve uncertainty estimation in PLMs.

I completed my Ph.D. in the Knowledge & Data Engineering Lab at the University of Tsukuba in Japan. During my Ph.D, I was lucky to be advised by Prof. Toshiyuki Amagasa on making use of machine learning and computational linguistics to reason about language and knowledge. I focused on question answering over knowledge base systems.

News

• [Fall, 2025] I will be teaching FRS 159, Teaching Computers to Understand African Languages
• [June 1, 2025] Teaching a PIIRS global seminar in Kenya
• [May 16, 2025] INJONGO: A multicultural Intent Detection and Slot-filling Dataset for 16 African languages accepted at ACL2025
• [May 8, 2025] Invited talk at DESIGN JUSTICE AI: Global Humanities Post-Institute Rutgers University
• [May 2, 2025] IrokoBench: A New Benchmark for African Languages in the Age of Large Language Models recieved the Out Standing Award at NAACL2025
• [April 22, 2025] Our work on Adapting Large Language Models for African Languages was featured on princeton AI Lab
• [Mar 22, 2025] Invited talk at the NJ Makers day
• [Feb 22, 2025] Invited talk at envision conference
• [Feb 7, 2025] My course on Teaching Computers to Understand African Languages was featured on Princeton University homepage
• [Dec 23, 2024] Our Lugha-Llama, African centric language models are available on Huggingface
• [Dec 12, 2024] Co-organizing the AfricaNLP 2025 Workshop on Multilingual and Multicultural-aware LLMs at ACL2025
• [2023] AfriQA paper have been accepted at EMNLP2023
• [2023] MasakhaPOS paper have been accepted at ACL2023