Publications

Selected peer-reviewed work. Full list on Google Scholar.

A curated selection of 20 papers. The complete list lives on Google Scholar.

2026

Afri-MCQA: Multimodal Cultural Question Answering for African Languages

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Srija Anand, Emilio Villa-Cueva, Israel Abebe Azime, Jesujoba O. Alabi, …, Alham Fikri Aji, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Thamar Solorio

Accepted to appear in ACL 2026

2025

The Esethu Framework: Reimagining Sustainable Dataset Governance and Curation for Low-Resource Languages

Jenalea Rajab, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Everlyn A. Chimoto, …, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Maushami Chetty, …, Vukosi Marivate, Benjamin Rosman

ACL 2025

ProverbEval: Exploring LLM Evaluation Challenges for Low-resource Language Understanding

Israel Abebe Azime, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Tadesse D. Belay, Yonas Chanie, …, Philipp Slusallek, Thamar Solorio, Dietrich Klakow

NAACL 2025 (Findings)

A Case Against Implicit Standards: Homophone Normalization in MT for Ge'ez-Script Languages

Hellina H. Nigatu, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Henok B. Ademtew, Hizkel M. Alemayehu, Negasi H. Abadi, Tadesse D. Belay, Seid M. Yimam

EMNLP 2025

CAMMT: Benchmarking Culturally Aware Multimodal Machine Translation

Emilio Villa-Cueva, Sholpan Bolatzhanova, Diana Turmakhan, Kareem Elzeky, …, Injy Hamed, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Thamar Solorio

EMNLP 2025 (Findings)

2024

EthioLLM: Multilingual Large Language Models for Ethiopian Languages with Task Evaluation

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Israel Abebe Azime, Tadesse D. Belay, Mesay Gemeda Yigezu, et al.

LREC-COLING 2024

CVQA: Culturally-diverse Multilingual Visual Question Answering Benchmark

David Romero, Chenyang Lyu, Haryo A. Wibowo, Teresa Lynn, Injy Hamed, Aditya N. Kishore, …, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja et al.

NeurIPS 2024 (Datasets & Benchmarks)

Walia-LLM: Enhancing Amharic-LLaMA by Integrating Task-Specific and Generative Datasets

Israel Abebe Azime, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Tadesse D. Belay, Mitiku Y. Fuge, Aman K. Wassie, …, Seid M. Yimam

EMNLP 2024 (Findings)

InkubaLM: A Small Language Model for Low-Resource African Languages

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Jessica Ojo, Jenalea Rajab, Fadel Thior, Eric P. Wairagala, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Pelonomi Moiloa, Jade Abbott, Vukosi Marivate, Benjamin Rosman

Preprint

The Zeno's Paradox of "Low-Resource" Languages

Hellina H. Nigatu, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Benjamin Rosman, Thamar Solorio, Monojit Choudhury

EMNLP 2024 ★ Outstanding Paper Award

2023

The Less the Merrier? Investigating Language Representation in Multilingual Models

Hellina H. Nigatu, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Jugal Kalita

EMNLP 2023 (Findings)

Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering for African Languages

Odunayo Ogundepo, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Clara Rivera, Jonathan H. Clark, Sebastian Ruder, David Adelani, Bonaventure Dossou, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja et al.

EMNLP 2023 (Findings)

AfriNames: Most ASR Models "Butcher" African Names

Tobi Olatunji, Tejumade Afonja, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Chris C. Emezue, Amina M. Rufai, Sahib Singh

INTERSPEECH 2023

AfriSpeech-200: Pan-African Accented Speech Dataset for Clinical and General Domain ASR

Tobi Olatunji, Tejumade Afonja, Aditya Yadavalli, Chris C. Emezue, Sahib Singh, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Joanne Osuchukwu, Salomey Osei, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Naome Etori, Clinton Mbataku

TACL 2023

MasakhaNEWS: News Topic Classification for African Languages

David I. Adelani, Marek Masiak, Israel Abebe Azime, Jesujoba O. Alabi, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Christine Mwase, Odunayo Ogundepo, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Akintunde Oladipo, …, Pontus Stenetorp

IJCNLP-AACL 2023 ★ Best Paper Award · Area Chair Award (Resources & Evaluation)