iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Hellina Hailu Nigatu

Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 18/10/2025

i’m looking to recruit a postdoc to work on this (documentation + evaluation on accuracy, reliability and societal impacts). hope to advertise detailed descriptions of the role in the coming weeks

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

Book #12 How Dare the Sun Rise? By Sandra Uwiringiyimana from the DRC This was a heavy one...I had to sit for a while with the first few chapters as Sandra recounted her experience of loss and greif...

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Reposted by Hellina Hailu Nigatu

Deb Raji @rajiinio.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

There is so much about navigating the Internet in a low resourced language that makes one unnecessarily vulnerable to malicious actors. It's not just a quality of experience difference, but literally the soft belly through which misinformation spreaders attack.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

This work was done with my wonderful collaborators Nuredin Ali, Fiker Tewelde, @schancellor.bsky.social and @iamdaricia.bsky.social 5/n

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

Based on our findings, we introduce the concept of Data Horizons: a critical boundary where algorithmic structures begin to degrade the relevance and reliability of search results. 4/n

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

We investigate online health information on #YouTube and #TikTok in two low-web data languages, Amharic and Tigrinya. We find that linguistic, technological, and socio-cultural constraints on information access and production lead to degraded information quality for low-web data languages. 3/n

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

While social media platforms are increasingly being used as sources of information for critical sectors like healthcare, the quality and quantity of information available is not always guaranteed, especially for languages with limited data available online. 2/n

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

Very excited for our upcoming #AIES paper Into the Void: Understanding Online Health Information in Low-Web Data Languages. Link: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20245 1/n

arxiv.org

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

እንኳን አብሮ አደረሰን! So far so good navigating the documentation! Will reach out if i need help or have questions 😊 thank you!

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

@meg48.bsky.social's Ethiopian new years gift to me is a new version of HornMorpho exactly as i am working on a project that requires morphological analyzer for Amharic, Tigrinya, and Afan Oromo 💃💃

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Reposted by Hellina Hailu Nigatu

Sarah E. Chasins @schasins.bsky.social · 28/08/2025

If you or your students are interested in visualization tools, may I suggest signing up for my student @parkie-doo.sh's study! We're learning *a lot* about how to build direct manipulation programming tools these days! Please pass the sign up link along to your labs! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

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Reposted by Hellina Hailu Nigatu

Milagros Miceli @milamiceli.bsky.social · 28/08/2025

I am thrilled to be recognized by TIME as one of the 100 most influential people worldwide in the field of artificial intelligence for my work with @dataworkersinquiry.bsky.social. >> #TIME100AI time.com/time100ai I want to take this opportunity to share a few reflections on this work 👇🧵

Portrait of Milagros Miceli in a frame that reads TIME100/AI 2025.

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 26/08/2025

Oh no! I ran out of wall space for my tally!!!😌

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 26/08/2025

I am gonna start a tally for every time i have to contend with publication policies at top tier conferences that implicitly stall Global South scholarship.

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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 😊

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

this is not to say all MT is bad or MT has no place in contribution...more on that as an output of my work @dairinstitute.bsky.social 😎

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

Lol here is an example: A google translated Tigrinya article: ti.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%88%... English version: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedding... I took the part that says "Ethiopia" from the English article and ran it through Google Translate...almost identical output save a few words.

ti.wikipedia.org

ልምዲ መርዓ ብሃገር - ዊኪፐድያ፣ ናጻ ኢንሳይክሎፐድያ

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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 · 11/08/2025

Omg our advisor @schasins.bsky.social got us beanbags for our lab space a while back and we loveee them

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 11/08/2025

This is a good step IMO...but i think we conflate "Wikipedia" with "English Wikipedia" and "AI Generated" with "LLM generated" We should also be having conversations on Machine Translated text in non-English Wikipedia...those are also "AI Generated"😐

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Hellina Hailu Nigatu @hellinanigatu.bsky.social · 30/07/2025

Was a pleasure to work with you Chinasa❤ here is to many more collaborations 🥂

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Reposted by Hellina Hailu Nigatu

Dr. Chinasa T. Okolo @chinasa.bsky.social · 30/07/2025

My latest work, “Examining the Cultural Encoding of Gender Bias in LLMs for Low-Resourced African Languages,” co-authored with Abigail Oppong and Hellina Nigatu, is now published at the Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing at #ACL2025! aclanthology.org/2025.gebnlp-...

Screenshot of paper on the ACL website with the title (Examining the Cultural Encoding of Gender Bias in LLMs for Low-Resourced African Languages) and abstract that reads: "Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) are deployed in several aspects of everyday life. While the technology could have several benefits, like many socio-technical systems, it also encodes several biases. Trained on large, crawled datasets from the web, these models perpetuate stereotypes and regurgitate representational bias that is rampant in their training data. Languages encode gender in varying ways; some languages are grammatically gendered, while others do not. Bias in the languages themselves may also vary based on cultural, social, and religious contexts. In this paper, we investigate gender bias in LLMs by selecting two languages, Twi and Amharic. Twi is a non-gendered African language spoken in Ghana, while Amharic is a gendered language spoken in Ethiopia. Using these two languages on the two ends of the continent and their opposing grammatical gender system, we evaluate LLMs in three tasks: Machine Translation, Image Generation, and Sentence Completion. Our results give insights into the gender bias encoded in LLMs using two low-resourced languages and broaden the conversation on how culture and social structures play a role in disparate system performances."

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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 · 28/07/2025

Watching this lecture by Dr. Fasil and Dr. Egid..I have not finished it but thought i would share the link for anyone interested...my main point of interest so far is in difficulty of translating philosophical terms and the role of language in philosophical thought www.youtube.com/live/JwXrGEC...

youtube.com

The Linguistic Politics of Ethiopian Philosophy (Fasil Merawi & Jonathan Egid)

YouTube video by GloPhi – Philosophizing in a Globalized World

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

Open to anything really! I have one book on my "to read" list that is a collection of poems ☺️

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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 #7 Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali from Somalia I don't think I can summarize my thoughts about this in a Bluesky post coz i have a lot of negative thoughts😅 so i am not going to attempt. Let's just say it was book #7 and leave it at that.

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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 #4 Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie This one i am sneaking in even though i read it years ago (if you know you know) There was a part that stuck with me...when power goes out in the city and comes back, the whole neighborhood cheers. And we do the exact same thing in Addis 😁

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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

I will be virtually at #ACL2025 next week!!! Virtual poster for bsky.app/profile/hell... Virtual poster for: bsky.app/profile/hell... And an invited talk for AfricaNLP 2025: sites.google.com/view/african...

sites.google.com

AfricaNLP 2025

About the Workshop

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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

zero-shot ASR is difficult due to many reasons; one being that languages use different writing scripts! Prior works handle this through the use of IPA. In this work, we: 1. Propose using transliteration as a means of zero-shot transfer 2. Select transfer languages based on shared phonetic coverage

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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

link to paper: aclanthology.org/2025.finding...

aclanthology.org

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