iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 13/08/2025

Came accross a common Ethiopian name on one of the poems in this book as a dedication 😊

Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 12/08/2025

Book #11 Missing in action and presumed Dead by Rashidah Ismaili from Benin Got this from Thrift Books and by luck got a version with the author signature ☺️ Its a beautiful collection of poems and my fav one is Nomad attached in the picture below

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

Book #10 In the company of Men by Veronique Tadjo of Cote d'Ivoire. A moving story of how Ebola ravaged communities told through different perspectives in each chapter. My fav chapter is when the story is narrated by the Baobab tree. Also touchs on economic politics of healthcare services.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

Book #9 Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo from Zambia My first thought is "intriguing." Details how aid harms African communities. However, I think there is little proposed as a practical recourse and that some of the depictions oversimplified the reality.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

Book #8 Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar by Emily Ruete Similar to the memoir I read from Leila Abouzeid of Morocco in a lot of ways. There were some difficult and at times painful parts to read, especially as it relates to Blackness and the experiences of Tanzanians and Ethiopians.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

Book #6 Unbowed by Wangari Maathai from Kenya A rec from @abeba.bsky.social ❤ One of the most powerful memoirs i have read. Many small similarities with growing up in Ethiopia, like being told being out in the rain will make you "grow", the central place fig trees have in the community...

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

Book #5 Unsung Giants Who Fought to Keep Africa Free by Okoth Owity Dpap from South Sudan The author uses linguistic evidence for claims about the lineage of his people. How the /ɲ/ sound was removed from many words and that made it difficult to make connections.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

Book #3 Return to Childhood by Leila Abouzeid from Morocco This was interesting in that it was a translation from Arabic and as someone who speaks a bit of Arabic, i could tell small features of the language being reflected :-) Also gave me a glimps into experience of Blackness in Morocco.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

Further, we find that our method improves upon prior work for zero-shot in Amharic with just 4% of the training data size.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

We also find that languages that have high individual phoneme coverage (Xhosa) and low number of unique characters with the test set (Spanish) give better transfer performance.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

We find that GMM-HMM models have better WER while XLS-R models have better CER. We believe this is due to the language model used for GMM-HMM models.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

We use Arabic, Spanish, French and Xhosa as transfer languages and Amharic as our target language. We train GMM-HMM models and fine-tune XLS-R with the transcripts of each language transliterated to Ge'ez script. Warning: Zero-Shot performance is bad!!! (see www.isca-archive.org/interspeech_...)

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

New paper accepted to AfricaNLP 2025: Exploring Transliteration-Based Zero-Shot Transfer for Amharic ASR with Prof. Hanan Aldarmaki from MBZUAI

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

3. Multilingual learning helped boost performance through cross-lingual linking.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

We experiment with using English and Arabic as transfer languages and Amharic and Tigrinya as target languages. We find: 1. Pre-trained models have very limited learned knowledge in low-resourced languages. Zero-shot performance was less than 6% accurate for both target languages.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

New paper accepted to the Findings of #ACL2025: mRAKL: Multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Knowledge Graph Construction for Low-Resourced Languages. Work done in collaboration with folks from Apple (Min Li, @maartjeterhoeve.bsky.social , Saloni Potdar) and my advisor @schasins.bsky.social

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

Book #1 is Decolonization and Afro-Feminism by Professor Sylvia Tamale. Was introduced to this book by a long thread on the other platform back in the day by @abeba.bsky.social :-) It has really informed a lot of my research, I even quote it in one of my papers:

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

Starting this project reminded me of one of my fav books by an Ethiopian author about the author's backpacking journey from South Africa to Egypt I just finished book #10 and decided to start posting about the books I am reading...not sure what I will post, maybe quotes, summaries, or reflections..

book cover with a map of Africa and a silhouette of a person with a backpack. The book title reads Abyssinian Nomad.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

At a time i am experiencing a local maxima in my level of impostor syndrome, just got home to find these delivered to my door step :-) thank you @wikimediafoundation.org @wikiresearch.bsky.social

A picture of a certificate that says "research award of the year" and physical barnstar that says "wikimedia foundation research award of the year"

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

Giving this talk in about 4 mins! Drop in if you are free and want to hear me rant about why the term "low-resource" is ambiguous and what aspects a language can be "low" in :-)

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

As I am wraping up my time in Vancouver for #NeurIPS2024, I want to share that our paper with @rajiinio.bsky.social won Best paper award at Black In AI ☺️

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

I am heading to #NeurIPS2024 to present our work with @rajiinio.bsky.social at the Black in AI Workshop. I will be giving a lighting talk and be at the poster session tomorrow and will be at the conference till the 14th! dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Extremely happy to announce I passed my qualification exam and I am now a PhD candidate! Huge thank you to my committee members @suhr.bsky.social @nilou.bsky.social Sarah Chasins, John Canny and Monojit Choudhury(who joined DESPITE the timezone difference!).

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

I will be giving a talk at teh Wikimidea Research Showcase on Nov 20th! It will be live streamed here: m.youtube.com/watch?v=61j5...

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

I presented a poster at the NLP for Wikipedia workshop on our paper understanding challenges faced by contributors' who try to create articles on Wikipedia in "low-resource" languages. dl.acm.org/doi/full/10....

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

I moderated a panel for the WiNLP workshop i co-organize on Global Voices: diversity in Methods, Minds, and Multilinguality.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

My time at #EMNLP2024 has come to an end...some highlights: We won Outstanding paper award for our work critiquing how "low-resource" languages are defined in NLP literature aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-m...

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