Ibrahim Said Ahmad, PhD

NLP Researcher #NLProc | @HausaNLP | @MasaKhaneNLP

[UNESCO @UNESCO]

Education must remain a common good in the age of #AI.

At @UNESCO’s #DigitalLearningWeek, education leaders adopted a joint Ministerial Statement calling for AI to support, not replace, the processes through which learners develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

Hear from Nigeria’s Minister of State for Education H.E. Prof. @Suwaiba_Said Ahmad as she reflects on the key challenges in navigating these questions. Learn more: https://t.co/lypaZ6wX3Z

@NigEducation

[Suwaiba Said Ahmad, PhD @Suwaiba_Said]

I had the honor of representing President Bola Ahmad Tinubu GCFR at the 76th Convocation Ceremony of the University of Ibadan.

The President urged Nigerian universities to reevaluate their performance in light of national and global standards. The President announced that the federal government as a listening government has recently reversed the 18-year minimum admission age for higher institutions to status quo ante.

The President appealed to university unions, particularly the Academic Staff Union of Universities, to acknowledge that all sectors require increased funding. The president assured that the federal government is diligently fulfilling its obligations within the available resources.

Additionally, the President encouraged university graduates to adopt a mindset of curiosity, openness to challenge, and adaptability to change.

Congratulations, graduates! Your hard work has paid off. Wishing you a bright future filled with success, growth, and positive impact.

[Suwaiba Said Ahmad, PhD @Suwaiba_Said]

It is my great pleasure to break ground on the collaborative partnership between the Federal Ministry of Education and Maslaha Homes Ltd under a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) land-swap arrangement.

The development of critical infrastructure at the National Commission for Mass Literacy, Adult & Non-Formal Education Kano Center in Farawa is not just a project; it is a pledge. A pledge to provide every Nigerian with the opportunity to gain essential literacy and numeracy skills.

The infrastructural projects that will be developed under this land swap deal are critical to enhancing the services and outreach of the National Commission for Mass Literacy, Adult & Non-Formal Education. The projects include modern classrooms, training facilities, administrative buildings, ICT centers, and other vital infrastructures.

Maslaha Homes Ltd has shown great vision in entering this partnership, and I commend their commitment to supporting the Federal Ministry of Education in advancing our educational goals.

I would like to thank the leadership of Maslaha Homes Ltd for their partnership and their vision for a better future. I also extend my gratitude to the dedicated team at the Federal Ministry of Education @NigEducation, the National Commission for Mass Literacy, Adult & Non-Formal Education and all those who have worked tirelessly to bring this project to fruition.

[Cynthia Rowe @CynthiaOMRowe]

Delighted to pay a congratulatory call on Hon. State Minister for Education Dr Ahmad @Suwaiba_Said @NigEducation 🇬🇧🇳🇬 over 20 years of partnership and looking to the future @UKinNigeria @PLANE_Nigeria

[Suwaiba Said Ahmad, PhD @Suwaiba_Said]

I am filled with gratitude to Almighty Allah for the opportunity to assume duty as the Honourable Minister of State for Education. I particularly wish to express my heartfelt appreciation to the President and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, GCFR @officialABAT Senate President⃰ and members of the National Assembly for finding me worthy to serve at this capacity.
To me, education is a lifelong passion from cradle to grave. I was born into it, nurtured through it, and grew up with it, leading me to where I find myself today. The priority of this government through the renewed hope agenda of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, GCFR, is to ensure that every Nigerian child acquires and experiences quality education. We aim to achieve this vision through holistic approaches that consider both micro and macro factors. These laudable goals cannot be achieved alone; hence, we plan to leverage and engage all stakeholders, such as parents, NGOs, CBOs, traditional leaders, and patriotic Nigerians who are willing to help us significantly reduce the number of out-of-school children (OoS).
To reduce unemployment among the youth, our administration will emphasize Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) to equip our youth with the necessary skills for gainful employment. This will also help reduce poverty, foster revenue generation, and increase income.
In line with the renewed hope agenda 2024 of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, GCFR, our office, in collaboration with development partners, community leaders, and other stakeholders, will focus on empowering the nation by providing accessible, equitable, and affordable quality education for girls to grow and develop tremendously. Our target is to conduct situational analysis using comprehensive mechanisms to identify the challenges surrounding girl child education and ensure the effective implementation of the existing policies across Nigeria.
We also plan to ensure access to inclusive and quality education at all levels by strengthening the implementation of existing policies, supporting inclusive and equitable education such as the National Policy on Education and the discrimination against persons with disabilities act. This will effectively promote access to quality education for all children, including those with special needs. Capacity building training for existing classroom teachers will be given attention to promote effective teaching and learning at all levels.
We are hopeful and committed to making all the pillars of the Nigerian education sector roadmap our core focus. By working together, we can bring about significant changes and create a brighter future for every child in Nigeria. It is my hope and prayer that, through the collective efforts of the Honorable Minister of Education, Dr. Tunji Alausa @DrTunjiAlausa, myself and the Permanent Secretary, Dr. Nasir Sani Gwarzo mni, NPOM, FWACP as well as all other stakeholders, Nigeria will witness a transformation in the narratives of education by Allah’s grace.

[Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern @Experiential_AI]

🏆 Congratulations to Research Scientist @shirandudy (pictured below), Postdoctoral Research Fellow @isabone and Principal Research Scientist @AgataLapedriza on their Best Paper Award in Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction at #ACII2024! 👏

Read about their research in cultural representations of emotions in LLMs: https://t.co/K4Vxo6johL

[Ibrahim Said Ahmad, PhD @isabone]

@davlanade @orevaahia @aremuadeolajr @kenza_ily @gongas_laura @gentaiscool @ruochenz_ Congratulations!!! Will you be coming to Miami?

[Text Based Emotion Analysis (SemEval 2025 Task) @EmoSemEval2025]

We are glad to announce @SemEvalWorkshop shared task 11: Bridging the Gap in Text-Based Emotion Detection. New textual datasets will be provided for 33 lgges (with many low-resource lgges)!
Task GitHub: https://t.co/NYLm3Rq5z9
CodaBench: https://t.co/O4HDqmqShW
Tracks👇🏻🧵1/

[UNITAR @UNITAR]

Application deadline extended to 10 September! 🚨

UNITAR and @‌MicrosoftAfrica invite women and youth from 24 African English-speaking countries to join the online digital skills training programme focused on Generative AI.

Apply now here: https://t.co/QJbxipVtfO

[Ibrahim Said Ahmad, PhD @isabone]

I am proud of this work. Thank you for leading it, @shirandudy.

[Rosanne Liu @savvyRL]

New fundraiser to support 25 Nigerian students to attend @DeepIndaba in September! 🌍

In 2022 we supported 8 Nigerian students to attend Indaba. This year we are raising $20k to support 25(!) of them to travel to Senegal for likely the most important career event in their lives!

[Jeffrey otoibhi @Jeffreypaul_]

🚀 Exciting News! We're thrilled to introduce Nigeria's first pretrained "foundational" language model, SabiYarn-125M, with 125 million parameters! 🎉

Try it out here:
🔗 [AI Playground](https://t.co/8NZbJKhzcE)
🔗 [Hugging Face Download](https://t.co/8SeGEuGCjZ)

Pretrained on approximately 29GB of cleaned data with a multi-task learning objective using causal language modeling, SabiYarn-125M performs in:
- 🌐 Text Generation
- 🌍 Translation (including inter-language translation)
- 😊 Sentiment Classification
- 📚 Topic Classification
- 📰 Text Summarization
- 🖊 Headline Generation
- Question Generation (majorly in english)
- 🔤 Text Diacritization

It performs (especially in the Nigerian languages) on although slightly worse:
- 📜 Simple Instruction Prompting
- Basic Question answering
- 🧹 Text Cleaning

Model did not perform on:
- Coding and Basic Reasoning tasks

Supporting multiple Nigerian languages: English, Yoruba, Hausa, Pidgin, Igbo, Efik, Urhobo, Fulah, and Fulfulde.

With a maximum token length of 1024! Model has not been finetuned in anyway.

Model Evaluation (mostly human): Ongoing to enhance capabilities further.

Contributors: @Jeffreypaul_ , @damilojohn, @DavidOkpare, @JOloganj,

Model name by @nuelhex0

With this work, we aim to collaborate with key stakeholders and others to build more intelligent, robust, and culturally aware AI models and systems for the African AI community and Nigeria as a whole. Together, we can enhance communication across all Nigerian dialects.

@awarritech @NaijaNLP @bosuntijani @OfficialSamAyo @davlanade @NITDANigeria @uniccongroup @MasaKhaneNLP @chuksekwuemee @DataFestAfrica @googleafrica @GoogleAI @neuralNet314 @3MTTNigeria @abacaj @janleike @ilyasut

Please check it out, retweet, like, and comment to help us reach more people! Let's put #SabiYarn to the test!

#SabiYarn #AI #NLP #Nigeria #Tech #Innovation

Special thanks to @karpathy for NanoGPT and the @huggingface transformers library for enabling advanced generation capabilities.

[Ibrahim Said Ahmad, PhD @isabone]

@Kaks2012 Thank you.

[Ibrahim Said Ahmad, PhD @isabone]

Excited to share our paper on how LLMs represent cultural diversity in low-resource languages! We compared ChatGPT vs. native Hausa speakers on cultural questions. Results show ChatGPT has limited alignment with human responses.

Link: https://t.co/tBFiYwZLt0

[William Chen @chenwanch1]

I'm excited to announce @WavLab's XEUS - an SSL speech encoder that covers over 4000+ languages!

XEUS is trained on over 1 million hours of speech. It outperforms both MMS 1B and w2v-BERT v2 2.0 on many tasks.

We're releasing the code, checkpoints, and our 4000+ lang. data! 🧵

[Ibrahim Said Ahmad, PhD @isabone]

@isasquare :D

[Ibrahim Said Ahmad, PhD @isabone]

@GidMak Thank you

[Ibrahim Said Ahmad, PhD @isabone]

I'm happy to share that our shared task description paper for SemEval 2024 received the best paper honorable mention award. Kudos to the great teamwork.

[SemEval @SemEvalWorkshop]

We are very pleased to announce the winners of these awards for @SemEvalWorkshop 2024!!

https://t.co/Zy9jotEJrk

Congratulations to the authors!
@naaclmeeting @shashwatup9k @harish @giodsm @seirasto

[Nedjma Ousidhoum نجمة أوسيدهم @nedjmaou]

Happy to share that our @SemEvalWorkshop shared task @SemRel2024 received a best paper honourable mention award! 😊
Thanks to the great team members.

[Nedjma Ousidhoum نجمة أوسيدهم @nedjmaou]

If you are/were involved in #NLProc projects on low-resource languages (language variants and dialects included), we’d like to hear from you. It takes a few minutes to fill in this survey👇 https://t.co/Zg9ygsZvlW
RTs appreciated! 😊
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