Hellina Hailu Nigatu

I started a personal project a while back...Working on African languages, I meet people from all over the continent. I found it very interesting how similar we can be on some things and how drastically different we are on others. So I decided to read one book from each African country...🧵

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

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...

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.

@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 💃💃

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...

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 👇🧵

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"😐

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-...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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 😁

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.

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...

Book #2 is "No Sweetness Here and Other Stories" by Ama Ata Aidoo from Ghana. Fav quote: "But my son, why must you travel that far just to cut grass? Is there not enough of it around here?", a father's response to a son who wants to go abroad to earn more money.