Ethio NLP

An initiative to create a formal NLP society for Ethiopian languages NLP research.
Team: @binephrem @seyyaw @surafelml

[Ethio NLP @ethionlp]

Congratulations @AtnafuLambebo 🎉🎉🎉

[MBZUAI @mbzuai]

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja grew up in southern Ethiopia, where over 45 languages are spoken, and where most of them are invisible to AI.

He brought that mission to MBZUAI as a postdoc, working with Professor Thamar Solorio on low-resource and multilingual NLP. In his time here, he co-authored a paper that won an outstanding paper award at EMNLP 2024, and built Afri-MCQA, a first-of-its-kind multimodal benchmark spanning 15 African languages, which has just been accepted at ACL 2026, ranked in the top 5% of submissions.

This March, he moved to London to take up a Google DeepMind Academic Fellowship at UCL- fully funded, three years, mentored by some of the best minds in AI.

The biggest thing he took from MBZUAI? The environment. "You have access to experienced professors, to students and researchers you can collaborate with, and to the resources you need. You don't have to worry about anything except the research itself."

Congratulations, Atnafu. The work continues, and the world is better for it. 🌍
Read his story 👉 https://t.co/TOBigaQcb8

[Ethio NLP @ethionlp]

About the workshop: https://t.co/qnBWCibLHC
Organizers:
@seyyaw
@tadesseit
@michaelmelesew
@Israel_Abebe
@AtnafuLambebo
@HellinaNigatu
@henokademtew

[Ethio NLP @ethionlp]

We are happy to announce that AIJ funded EthioNLP Workshop on NLP for Ethiopian languages, co-located with ICES22 in Hawassa (Sep 29–Oct 3, 2025) — AIJ (via Univ. of Hamburg / HCDS) will support accepted Ethiopian authors with travel, registration & accommodation.

[Ethio NLP @ethionlp]

Reminder: The deadline for submitting papers for the 1st EthioNLP Workshop at ICES22 is May 30, 2025!

Submit your abstracts here: https://t.co/bAgx1TiPPV
More: https://t.co/22b1rJLavi
@seyyaw @tadesseit @michaelmelesew @Israel_Abebe @AtnafuLambebo @HellinaNigatu @henokademtew

[Ethio NLP @ethionlp]

Paper 1 Link: https://t.co/HLTKtzIO1o
Paper 2 Link: https://t.co/iVb2FmGlu3
Paper 3 Link: https://t.co/Z4unhOVbzh

[Ethio NLP @ethionlp]

Happy to share papers from members of EthioNLP at #NAACL2025

1. ProverbEval: Exploring LLM Evaluation Challenges

2. CULEMO: Cultural Lenses on Emotion: Cross-Cultural Emotion Understanding

3. AfriHate: A Multilingual Hate Speech and Abusive Language Datasets for African Lang

[Ethio NLP @ethionlp]

Organizers: Dr. Martha Yifru Tachebele @seyyaw @michaelmelesew @AtnafuLambebo @tadesseit @Israel_Abebe @abinewaliayele @HellinaNigatu @henokademtew

[Ethio NLP @ethionlp]

Calling all #NLP enthusiasts! Join us for the 1st Workshop on NLP for Ethiopian Languages, co-located with ICES22 at Hawassa University 🇪🇹.

📅 Submit by May 20, 2025
📣 Notifications on June 15, 2025
📄 Full papers due June 30, 2025
📍 Workshop: Sept 29–Oct 3, 2025

[Ethio NLP @ethionlp]

This event will be co-located with the 22nd International Conference of Ethiopian Studies (ICES22).

Submission Link: https://t.co/4boknaaoOc
Official Website: https://t.co/D09jHH2K4Y
Email: [email protected]
Conference Site: https://t.co/2Afy9Z8i60

[Ethio NLP @ethionlp]

👋EthioNLP at EMNLP 2024
@AtnafuLambebo @HellinaNigatu @tadesseit
#EMNLP2024

[Ethio NLP @ethionlp]

Find the paper here: https://t.co/kz3bwKKQos

[Ethio NLP @ethionlp]

🎉Congrats to EthioNLP members @HellinaNigatu and @atnafultonja for winning Outstanding Paper Award at @emnlpmeeting for their paper, The Zeno's Paradox of "Low - Resource" Languages.

And a big congratulations to all @monojitchou @thamar_solorio @BenjaminRosman.

[Israel Abebe | እስራኤል አበበ @Israel_Abebe]

Our work has been accepted to the #EMNLP2024 Findings! 🎉

[Atnafu Lambebo 🇪🇹 @AtnafuLambebo]

Two papers are accepted at EMNLP 2024
- The Zeno’s Paradox of ‘Low-Resource’ Languages, with @HellinaNigatu ,@BenjaminRosman , @thamar_solorio & @monojitchou
- Walia-LLM: Enhancing Amharic-LLaMA by Integrating Task-Specific and Generative Datasets, with @Israel_Abebe, @seyyaw,et al.

[Ethio NLP @ethionlp]

@Israel_Abebe and Abinew Ali presenting "EthioLLM: Multilingual Large Language Models for Ethiopian Languages with Task Evaluation" at @LrecColing 2024 in Turin, Italy. 🚀

[Ethio NLP @ethionlp]

🎉We are happy to announce our work "EthioLLM: Multilingual Large Language Models for Ethiopian Languages with Task Evaluation" has been accepted to @LrecColing 2024.
1/🧵

[Ethio NLP @ethionlp]

1. Exploring Boundaries and Intensities in Offensive and Hate Speech: Unveiling the Complex Spectrum of Social Media Discourse
2. Detecting Hate Speech in Amharic Using Multimodal Analysis of Social Media Memes Resources for this publication can be accessed from the GitHub repo.

[Ethio NLP @ethionlp]

🎊Our members are shining at @LrecColing. Abinew Ali Ayele has presented two original papers at the Fourth Workshop on Threat, Aggression, and Cyberbullying, which is co-located with LREC-COLING2024, in Turin, Italy. The papers are:🧵

[Ethio NLP @ethionlp]

📌Mark your calendars for Tuesday, April 30th, as @Israel_Abebe, a member of EthioNLP, presents Walia-LLM.

[Masakhane @MasakhaneNLP]

🎙️ Join Israel for a presentation on : "Walia-LLM: Enhancing Amharic-LLaMA by Integrating Task-Specific and Generative Datasets" https://t.co/d5ht5Ep9MU

📅 Date: Tuesday, April 30, 2024
⏰ Time: 4 PM UTC

🔗 Zoom Link: Available on Slack

Be there!🚀

#Masakhane #NLP

[Ethio NLP @ethionlp]

🎉Big News from EthioNLP!

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja(@AtnafuLambebo) a core team member of EthioNLP has embarked on a journey as a Visiting Student at @mbzuai, focusing on low-resource NLP. This milestone highlights his dedication and our team's talent.

Congrats on the new role!

[Ethio NLP @ethionlp]

Congrats to the authors @AtnafuLambebo, @Israel_Abebe, @tadesseit1, @Mesay_Gemeda, @MehamedMog44232 , @abinewaliayele, Ebrahim Chekol Jibril, @michaelmelesew, Olga Kolesnikova, Philipp Slusallek, Dietrich Klakow, Shengwu Xiong, and @seyyaw. 🎉

[Ethio NLP @ethionlp]

🎉We are happy to announce our work "EthioLLM: Multilingual Large Language Models for Ethiopian Languages with Task Evaluation" has been accepted to @LrecColing 2024.
1/🧵

[Ethio NLP @ethionlp]

Checkout our work https://t.co/LHtGU5c1qa. Our models and datasets are available https://t.co/0BvPrwdN0d.
3/🧵