news

News and updates.

Jun 02, 2026 Returning to AIMS South Africa as Visiting Professor to teach NLP & LLMs for the upcoming Nov–Dec 2026 cohort.
May 30, 2026 New preprint: Temporal Simultaneity Predicts Annotation Quality in Sentiment Corpora. 📄
May 28, 2026 New preprint: AfriScience-MT — Towards Decolonizing Science in Africa through Text Translation. 📄
Mar 25, 2026 Several papers at AfricaNLP 2026 (Rabat), where I also serve as a workshop co-organiser.
Jan 15, 2026 Co-organising two SemEval-2026 shared tasks — multilingual online polarization detection, and dimensional aspect-based sentiment & stance.
Dec 08, 2025 As Visiting Professor, taught NLP & LLMs at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), South Africa (Nov–Dec 2025).
Nov 01, 2025 Awarded Principal Investigator on AfriGemma: Advancing African Language NLP for Research, Healthcare, and Societal Benefit. 🎉
Aug 01, 2025 🏆 Our SemEval-2025 Task 11 on text-based emotion detection was awarded Best Task.
Jul 30, 2025 🏆 BRIGHTER won Best Resource Paper at ACL 2025!
Jul 28, 2025 BRIGHTER appeared at ACL 2025, and our SemEval-2025 Task 11 on text-based emotion detection ran across 30+ languages.
Apr 30, 2025 Presented AfriHate, a multilingual hate & abusive-language collection for African languages, at NAACL 2025.
Jun 20, 2024 🏆 SemEval-2024 Task 1 (Semantic Textual Relatedness) earned a Best Task Paper Honorable Mention.
Dec 12, 2023 🏆 AfriHate was listed in the IRCAI Global Top 100 Outstanding AI Projects Advancing the SDGs (UNESCO).
Nov 03, 2023 🏆 MasakhaNEWS won the Area Chair Award (Resources & Evaluation) at IJCNLP-AACL 2023.
May 15, 2023 🏆 AfriSenti received the Best Non-archival Paper award at AfricaNLP 2023.