Awards & Recognitions

Over the years, my research and community contributions have received recognition at top-tier venues. Below is a selection of my awards and distinctions.

2025

  • ACL 2025 – Best Resource Paper Award
    BRIGHTER: BRIdging the Gap in Human-Annotated Textual Emotion Recognition Datasets for 28 Languages.
    Read the paper

  • SemEval 2025 – Best Task Paper Award
    Task 11: Bridging the Gap in Text-Based Emotion Detection.
    (See BRIGHTER as part of the shared task)
    Task details

  • NAACL 2025 – Outstanding Paper Award
    IrokoBench: A New Benchmark for African Languages in the Age of Large Language Models.
    Read the paper

  • Deep Learning Indaba 2025 – Best Paper Award
    The State of Large Language Models for African Languages.
    Read the paper

2024

  • NeurIPS 2024 (C3NLP Workshop) – Best Non-archival Paper Award
    BLEnD: Everyday Knowledge in Diverse Cultures and Languages.
    Read the paper

  • SemEval 2024 – Honourable Mention (Best Task Paper)
    Semantic Textual Relatedness Task.
    Read the paper

2023

  • AfricaNLP 2023 (Kigali) – Best Non-archival Paper Award
    AfriSenti: A Twitter Sentiment Analysis Benchmark for African Languages.
    Read the paper

  • IJCNLP–AACL 2023 – Area Chair Award
    MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African Languages.
    Read the paper

2020

  • EMNLP 2020 (Findings) – Wikimedia Research Award
    Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation.
    Read the paper

Honors

  • Second Best Graduating Student (Computer Science) — Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria

Fellowships & Scholarships

  • 2024 – Google DeepMind Academic Fellow, Imperial College London, UK
  • 2022 – Faculty of Science PhD Scholarship, University of Porto (€52,000)
  • 2022 – Jiangsu University PhD Scholarship (Declined)
  • 2018 – Nigerian TETFund PhD Scholarship Award ($25,000)
  • 2018 – NITDA MSc Scholarship Award
  • 2018 – Kano State Government Postgraduate Scholarship (MSc in Computer Science, Declined)

Travel Awards

  • 2022 – Google Africa Travel Award ($3,000)
  • 2022 – RStudio Conference Travel Award ($1,500)
  • 2022 – EMNLP Conference Travel Award ($1,500)
  • 2018 – Black in AI Travel Award to NeurIPS ($1,100)

Research Grants & Awards

  • 2025 – Principal Investigator (PI): Open Data Collection Playbook & Platform ($430,000)
  • 2023 – PI: Nigerian AI Research Grant — Offensive Language Detection (₦5,000,000)
  • 2023 – Co-PI: Google Research exploreCSR Award ($18,000)
  • 2023 – Co-PI: Google Research TensorFlow Award ($10,000)
  • 2022 – PI: AI for Education Innovation Research Network in Africa ($40,000)
  • 2021 – PI: Lacuna Fund — Hate Speech Dataset for African Languages ($147,000)
  • 2021 – PI: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Award ($50,000)
  • 2021 – Co-Investigator (Co-I): Lacuna Fund — Nigerian Speech Corpus ($120,000)

Project Recognition

  • 2025 – IRCAI Global Top 100 AI Projects Award
    AfriHate: A Multilingual Collection of Hate Speech and Abusive Language Datasets for African Languages — recognized for advancing UN Sustainable Development Goals. Read the paper