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
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.
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
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
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
@Israel_Abebe and Abinew Ali presenting "EthioLLM: Multilingual Large Language Models for Ethiopian Languages with Task Evaluation" at @LrecColing 2024 in Turin, Italy. 🚀
🎉We are happy to announce our work "EthioLLM: Multilingual Large Language Models for Ethiopian Languages with Task Evaluation" has been accepted to @LrecColing 2024.
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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.
🎊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:🧵
🎙️ 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
🎉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!
🎉We are happy to announce our work "EthioLLM: Multilingual Large Language Models for Ethiopian Languages with Task Evaluation" has been accepted to @LrecColing 2024.
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