publications | HausaNLP Research Group

2025

SoLLMs-AfL

The State of Large Language Models for African Languages: Progress and Challenges

Kedir Yassin Hussen, Walelign Tewabe Sewunetie, Abinew Ali Ayele, and 3 more authors

2025

@misc{hussen2025statelargelanguagemodels,
  title = {The State of Large Language Models for African Languages: Progress and Challenges},
  author = {Hussen, Kedir Yassin and Sewunetie, Walelign Tewabe and Ayele, Abinew Ali and Imam, Sukairaj Hafiz and Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan and Yimam, Seid Muhie},
  year = {2025},
  eprint = {2506.02280},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.AI},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02280},
}

ASR-AfLRL

Automatic Speech Recognition for African Low-Resource Languages: Challenges and Future Directions

Sukairaj Hafiz Imam, Babangida Sani, Dawit Ketema Gete, and 6 more authors

2025

Bib PDF

@misc{imam2025automaticspeechrecognitionafrican,
  title = {Automatic Speech Recognition for African Low-Resource Languages: Challenges and Future Directions},
  author = {Imam, Sukairaj Hafiz and Sani, Babangida and Gete, Dawit Ketema and Ahamed, Bedru Yimam and Ahmad, Ibrahim Said and Abdulmumin, Idris and Yimam, Seid Muhie and Bello, Muhammad Yahuza and Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan},
  year = {2025},
  eprint = {2505.11690},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.CL},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11690},
}

POLAR: BM3OP

POLAR: A Benchmark for Multilingual, Multicultural, and Multi-Event Online Polarization

Usman Naseem, Juan Ren, Saba Anwar, and 14 more authors

2025

Bib PDF

@misc{naseem2025polarbenchmarkmultilingualmulticultural,
  title = {POLAR: A Benchmark for Multilingual, Multicultural, and Multi-Event Online Polarization},
  author = {Naseem, Usman and Ren, Juan and Anwar, Saba and Kohail, Sarah and Veliz, Rudy Alexandro Garrido and Geislinger, Robert and Jabr, Aisha and Abdulmumin, Idris and Qureshi, Laiba and Borkar, Aarushi Ajay and Mukhtar, Maryam Ibrahim and Ayele, Abinew Ali and Ahmad, Ibrahim Said and Ali, Adem and Semmann, Martin and Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan and Yimam, Seid Muhie},
  year = {2025},
  eprint = {2505.20624},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.CL},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20624},
}

ECN-EP-15AfL

Exploring Cultural Nuances in Emotion Perception Across 15 African Languages

Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Shiran Dudy, Tadesse Destaw Belay, and 4 more authors

2025

Bib PDF

@misc{ahmad2025exploringculturalnuancesemotion,
  title = {Exploring Cultural Nuances in Emotion Perception Across 15 African Languages},
  author = {Ahmad, Ibrahim Said and Dudy, Shiran and Belay, Tadesse Destaw and Abdulmumin, Idris and Yimam, Seid Muhie and Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan and Church, Kenneth},
  year = {2025},
  eprint = {2503.19642},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.CL},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.19642},
}

2024

Uhura: BE-SQAT-LRAfL

Uhura: A Benchmark for Evaluating Scientific Question Answering and Truthfulness in Low-Resource African Languages

Edward Bayes, Israel Abebe Azime, Jesujoba O. Alabi, and 11 more authors

2024

Bib PDF

@misc{bayes2024uhurabenchmarkevaluatingscientific,
  title = {Uhura: A Benchmark for Evaluating Scientific Question Answering and Truthfulness in Low-Resource African Languages},
  author = {Bayes, Edward and Azime, Israel Abebe and Alabi, Jesujoba O. and Kgomo, Jonas and Eloundou, Tyna and Proehl, Elizabeth and Chen, Kai and Khadir, Imaan and Etori, Naome A. and Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan and Mpanza, Choice and Thete, Igneciah Pocia and Klakow, Dietrich and Adelani, David Ifeoluwa},
  year = {2024},
  eprint = {2412.00948},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.CL},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.00948},
}

ACVS-NC: IMATD

Analyzing COVID-19 Vaccination Sentiments in Nigerian Cyberspace: Insights from a Manually Annotated Twitter Dataset

Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Lukman Jibril Aliyu, Abubakar Auwal Khalid, and 6 more authors

2024

Bib PDF

@misc{ahmad2024analyzingcovid19vaccinationsentiments,
  title = {Analyzing COVID-19 Vaccination Sentiments in Nigerian Cyberspace: Insights from a Manually Annotated Twitter Dataset},
  author = {Ahmad, Ibrahim Said and Aliyu, Lukman Jibril and Khalid, Abubakar Auwal and Aliyu, Saminu Muhammad and Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan and Abdulmumin, Idris and Abduljalil, Bala Mairiga and Bello, Bello Shehu and Abubakar, Amina Imam},
  year = {2024},
  eprint = {2401.13133},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.CL},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.13133},
}

CFED-4AfL

Correcting FLORES Evaluation Dataset for Four African Languages

Idris Abdulmumin, Sthembiso Mkhwanazi, Mahlatse S. Mbooi, and 7 more authors

2024

Bib PDF

@misc{abdulmumin2024correctingfloresevaluationdataset,
  title = {Correcting FLORES Evaluation Dataset for Four African Languages},
  author = {Abdulmumin, Idris and Mkhwanazi, Sthembiso and Mbooi, Mahlatse S. and Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan and Ahmad, Ibrahim Said and Putini, Neo and Mathebula, Miehleketo and Shingange, Matimba and Gwadabe, Tajuddeen and Marivate, Vukosi},
  year = {2024},
  eprint = {2409.00626},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.CL},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.00626},
}

2023

HausaNLP-SemEval23: TL-SDS-MSC

HausaNLP at SemEval-2023 Task 10: Transfer Learning, Synthetic Data and Side-information for Multi-level Sexism Classification

Saminu Aliyu, Saheed Abdullahi, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, and 4 more authors

2023

Bib

@unpublished{hausanlp-semeval-2023,
  author = {Aliyu, Saminu and Abdullahi, Saheed and Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan and Ahmad, Ibrahim Sa'id and Abdulmumin, Idris and Yusuf, Aliyu and Lawan, Falalu},
  title = {HausaNLP at SemEval-2023 Task 10: Transfer Learning, Synthetic Data and Side-information for Multi-level Sexism Classification},
  year = {2023},
}

HaVQA: DVQA-MRLH

HaVQA: A Dataset for Visual Question Answering and Multimodal Research in Hausa Language

Shantipriya Parida, Idris Abdulmumin, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, and 7 more authors

2023

Bib

@unpublished{havqa-2023,
  author = {Parida, Shantipriya and Abdulmumin, Idris and Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan and Bose, Aneesh and Kohli, Guneet Singh and Ahmad, Ibrahim Said and Kotwal, Ketan and Sarkar, Sayan Deb and Bojar, Ondřej and Kakudi, Habeebah},
  title = {HaVQA: A Dataset for Visual Question Answering and Multimodal Research in Hausa Language},
  year = {2023},
}

AfriSenti: TSABAfL

AfriSenti: A Twitter Sentiment Analysis Benchmark for African Languages

Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Idris Abdulmumin, Abinew Ali Ayele, and 8 more authors

2023

DOI Bib

@misc{https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2302.08956,
  author = {Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan and Abdulmumin, Idris and Ayele, Abinew Ali and Ousidhoum, Nedjma and Adelani, David Ifeoluwa and Yimam, Seid Muhie and Ahmad, Ibrahim Sa'id and Beloucif, Meriem and Mohammad, Saif and Ruder, Sebastian and others},
  doi = {10.48550/ARXIV.2302.08956},
  publisher = {arXiv},
  title = {AfriSenti: A Twitter Sentiment Analysis Benchmark for African Languages},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.08956},
  year = {2023},
}

SemEval23-Task12: SAfAfL

SemEval 2023 Task 12: Sentiment Analysis for African Languages (AfriSenti-SemEval)

Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Idris Abdulmumin, Seid Muhie Yimam, and 7 more authors

In Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023), Jul 2023

Bib

@inproceedings{muhammad-etal-2023-semeval,
  address = {Toronto, Canada},
  author = {Muhammad, Shamsuddeen and Abdulmumin, Idris and Yimam, Seid Muhie and Adelani, David Ifeoluwa and Ahmad, Ibrahim Sa'id and Ousidhoum, Nedjma and Ayele, Abinew Ali and Mohammad, Saif M. and Beloucif, Meriem and Ruder, Sebastian},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023)},
  month = jul,
  title = {SemEval 2023 Task 12: Sentiment Analysis for African Languages (AfriSenti-SemEval)},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.06845},
  year = {2023},
}

MasakhaPOS: PoST-TDAL

MasakhaPOS: Part-of-Speech Tagging for Typologically Diverse African Languages

Cheikh M. Bamba Dione, David Adelani, Peter Nabende, and 41 more authors

Jul 2023

Bib PDF

@misc{dione2023masakhapospartofspeechtaggingtypologically,
  title = {MasakhaPOS: Part-of-Speech Tagging for Typologically Diverse African Languages},
  author = {Dione, Cheikh M. Bamba and Adelani, David and Nabende, Peter and Alabi, Jesujoba and Sindane, Thapelo and Buzaaba, Happy and Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan and Emezue, Chris Chinenye and Ogayo, Perez and Aremu, Anuoluwapo and Gitau, Catherine and Mbaye, Derguene and Mukiibi, Jonathan and Sibanda, Blessing and Dossou, Bonaventure F. P. and Bukula, Andiswa and Mabuya, Rooweither and Tapo, Allahsera Auguste and Munkoh-Buabeng, Edwin and victoire Memdjokam Koagne and Kabore, Fatoumata Ouoba and Taylor, Amelia and Kalipe, Godson and Macucwa, Tebogo and Marivate, Vukosi and Gwadabe, Tajuddeen and Elvis, Mboning Tchiaze and Onyenwe, Ikechukwu and Atindogbe, Gratien and Adelani, Tolulope and Akinade, Idris and Samuel, Olanrewaju and Nahimana, Marien and Musabeyezu, Théogène and Niyomutabazi, Emile and Chimhenga, Ester and Gotosa, Kudzai and Mizha, Patrick and Agbolo, Apelete and Traore, Seydou and Uchechukwu, Chinedu and Yusuf, Aliyu and Abdullahi, Muhammad and Klakow, Dietrich},
  year = {2023},
  eprint = {2305.13989},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.CL},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.13989},
}

AfricStops: CSfAL

The African Stopwords project: curating stopwords for African languages

Chris Emezue, Hellina Nigatu, Cynthia Thinwa, and 19 more authors

Jul 2023

Bib PDF

@misc{emezue2023africanstopwordsprojectcurating,
  title = {The African Stopwords project: curating stopwords for African languages},
  author = {Emezue, Chris and Nigatu, Hellina and Thinwa, Cynthia and Zhou, Helper and Muhammad, Shamsuddeen and Louis, Lerato and Abdulmumin, Idris and Oyerinde, Samuel and Ajibade, Benjamin and Samuel, Olanrewaju and Joshua, Oviawe and Onwuegbuzia, Emeka and Emezue, Handel and Ige, Ifeoluwatayo A. and Tonja, Atnafu Lambebo and Chukwuneke, Chiamaka and Dossou, Bonaventure F. P. and Etori, Naome A. and Emmanuel, Mbonu Chinedu and Yousuf, Oreen and Aina, Kaosarat and David, Davis},
  year = {2023},
  eprint = {2304.12155},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.CL},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.12155},
}

2022

HVG: MMEHMT

Hausa Visual Genome: A Dataset for Multi-Modal English to Hausa Machine Translation

Idris Abdulmumin, Satya Ranjan Dash, Musa Abdullahi Dawud, and 3 more authors

In Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Jun 2022

Bib

@inproceedings{abdulmumin-EtAl:2022:LREC,
  address = {Marseille, France},
  author = {Abdulmumin, Idris and Dash, Satya Ranjan and Dawud, Musa Abdullahi and Parida, Shantipriya and Muhammad, Shamsuddeen and others},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference},
  month = jun,
  pages = {6471--6479},
  publisher = {European Language Resources Association},
  title = {Hausa Visual Genome: A Dataset for Multi-Modal English to Hausa Machine Translation},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.694},
  year = {2022},
}

SGC: DFIMT-LRAfL

Separating Grains from the Chaff: Using Data Filtering to Improve Multilingual Translation for Low-Resourced African Languages

Idris Abdulmumin, Michael Beukman, Jesujoba Alabi, and 5 more authors

In Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation, Dec 2022

Bib

@inproceedings{abdulmumin-EtAl:2022:WMT,
  address = {Abu Dhabi},
  author = {Abdulmumin, Idris and Beukman, Michael and Alabi, Jesujoba and Emezue, Chris Chinenye and Chimoto, Everlyn and Adewumi, Tosin and Muhammad, Shamsuddeen and others},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation},
  month = dec,
  pages = {1001--1014},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  title = {Separating Grains from the Chaff: Using Data Filtering to Improve Multilingual Translation for Low-Resourced African Languages},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.10692},
  year = {2022},
}

HERDPhobia: HSD-FHNiN

HERDPhobia: A Dataset for Hate Speech Detection against Fulani Herdsmen in Nigeria

Saminu Aliyu, Gregory Wajiga, Muhammad Murtala, and 3 more authors

In Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Widening Natural Language Processing, Dec 2022

Bib

@inproceedings{aliyu-2022-herdphobia,
  address = {Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates},
  author = {Aliyu, Saminu and Wajiga, Gregory and Murtala, Muhammad and Muhammad, Shamsuddeen and Abdulmumin, Idris and Ahmad, Ibrahim},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Widening Natural Language Processing},
  month = dec,
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  title = {HERDPhobia: A Dataset for Hate Speech Detection against Fulani Herdsmen in Nigeria},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2022.winlp-1.0},
  year = {2022},
}

NaijaSenti: NTSC-MSA

NaijaSenti: A Nigerian Twitter Sentiment Corpus for Multilingual Sentiment Analysis

Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Sebastian Ruder, and 5 more authors

Dec 2022

Bib PDF

@misc{muhammad2022naijasenti,
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  author = {Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan and Adelani, David Ifeoluwa and Ruder, Sebastian and Ahmad, Ibrahim Said and Abdulmumin, Idris and Bello, Bello Shehu and Choudhury, Monojit and others},
  eprint = {2201.08277},
  primaryclass = {cs.CL},
  title = {NaijaSenti: A Nigerian Twitter Sentiment Corpus for Multilingual Sentiment Analysis},
  year = {2022},
}

2021

EFA-SAEHT

An Enhanced Feature Acquisition for Sentiment Analysis of English and Hausa Tweets

Amina Imam Abubakar, Abubakar Roko, Aminu Muhammad Bui, and 1 more author

International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, Dec 2021

DOI Bib

@article{Abubakar2021,
  author = {Abubakar, Amina Imam and Roko, Abubakar and Bui, Aminu Muhammad and Saidu, Ibrahim},
  doi = {10.14569/IJACSA.2021.0120913},
  journal = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  number = {9},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  title = {An Enhanced Feature Acquisition for Sentiment Analysis of English and Hausa Tweets},
  url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2021.0120913},
  volume = {12},
  year = {2021},
}

2020

STI-BT-LRNMT
Using Self-Training to Improve Back-Translation in Low Resource Neural Machine Translation

Idris Abdulmumin, Bashir Shehu Galadanci, and Abubakar Isa

Jun 2020

Abs Bib

Improving neural machine translation (NMT) models using the back-translations of the monolingual target data (synthetic parallel data) is currently the state-of-the-art approach for training improved translation systems. The quality of the backward system - which is trained on the available parallel data and used for the back-translation - has been shown in many studies to affect the performance of the final NMT model. In low resource conditions, the available parallel data is usually not enough to train a backward model that can produce the qualitative synthetic data needed to train a standard translation model. This work proposes a self-training strategy where the output of the backward model is used to improve the model itself through the forward translation technique. The technique was shown to improve baseline low resource IWSLT’14 English-German and IWSLT’15 English-Vietnamese backward translation models by 11.06 and 1.5 BLEUs respectively. The synthetic data generated by the improved English-German backward model was used to train a forward model which out-performed another forward model trained using standard back-translation by 2.7 BLEU.
@article{Abdulmumin:2020aa, author = {Abdulmumin, Idris and Galadanci, Bashir Shehu and Isa, Abubakar}, bdsk-url-1 = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.02876.pdf}, bdsk-url-2 = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.02876}, date-added = {2020-11-07 05:02:01 +0000}, date-modified = {2020-11-07 05:02:01 +0000}, eprint = {2006.02876}, month = jun, title = {Using Self-Training to Improve Back-Translation in Low Resource Neural Machine Translation}, url = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.02876.pdf}, year = {2020}, }

PR-LRMT: CSAfL

Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languages

Wilhelmina Nekoto, Vukosi Marivate, Tshinondiwa Matsila, and 6 more authors

Jun 2020

Bib PDF

@misc{nekoto2020participatory,
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  author = {Nekoto, Wilhelmina and Marivate, Vukosi and Matsila, Tshinondiwa and Fasubaa, Timi and Kolawole, Tajudeen and Fagbohungbe, Taiwo and Akinola, Solomon Oluwole and Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan and others},
  eprint = {2010.02353},
  primaryclass = {cs.CL},
  title = {Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languages},
  year = {2020},
}

2019

hauWE: HWENLP
hauWE: Hausa Words Embedding for Natural Language Processing

Idris Abdulmumin and Bashir Shehu Galadanci

Nov 2019

Abs DOI Bib

Words embedding (distributed word vector representations) have become an essential component of many natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as machine translation, sentiment analysis, word analogy, named entity recognition and word similarity. Despite this, the only work that provides word vectors for Hausa language is that of Bojanowski et al. [1] trained using fastText, consisting of only a few words vectors. This work presents words embedding models using Word2Vec’s Continuous Bag of Words (CBoW) and Skip Gram (SG) models. The models, hauWE (Hausa Words Embedding), are bigger and better than the only previous model, making them more useful in NLP tasks. To compare the models, they were used to predict the 10 most similar words to 30 randomly selected Hausa words. hauWE CBoW’s 88.7% and hauWE SG’s 79.3% prediction accuracy greatly outperformed Bojanowski et al. [1]’s 22.3%.
@article{Abdulmumin:2019aa, author = {Abdulmumin, Idris and Galadanci, Bashir Shehu}, bdsk-url-1 = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.10708.pdf}, bdsk-url-2 = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.10708}, bdsk-url-3 = {https://doi.org/10.1109/NigeriaComputConf45974.2019.8949674}, date-added = {2020-11-07 05:00:32 +0000}, date-modified = {2020-11-07 05:00:32 +0000}, doi = {10.1109/NigeriaComputConf45974.2019.8949674}, eprint = {1911.10708}, month = nov, title = {hauWE: Hausa Words Embedding for Natural Language Processing}, url = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.10708.pdf}, year = {2019}, }

Hausa WordNet: ELR

Hausa WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Resource

Amina Imam Abubakar, Abubakar Roko, A. B. Muhammad, and 1 more author

In , Nov 2019

Bib

@inproceedings{Abubakar2019HausaWA,
  title = {Hausa WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Resource},
  author = {Abubakar, Amina Imam and Roko, Abubakar and Muhammad, A. B. and Saidu, Ibrahim},
  year = {2019},
}

2014

TNA-FC-HL

Text normalization algorithm for facebook chats in hausa language

Jaafar Zubairu Maitama, Usman Haruna, Abdullahi Ya’u Gambo, and 4 more authors

In The 5th International Conference on Information and Communication Technology for The Muslim World (ICT4M), Nov 2014

Bib PDF

@inproceedings{maitama2014text,
  author = {Maitama, Jaafar Zubairu and Haruna, Usman and Gambo, Abdullahi Ya'u and Thomas, Bimba Andrew and Idris, Norisma Binti and Gital, Abdulsalam Ya'u and Abubakar, Adamu I},
  booktitle = {The 5th International Conference on Information and Communication Technology for The Muslim World (ICT4M)},
  organization = {IEEE},
  pages = {1--4},
  title = {Text normalization algorithm for facebook chats in hausa language},
  year = {2014},
}