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 other recognitions.

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

Research Grants & Awards

  • 2026 – Co-PI: Generative AI for Anxiety, Depression and Psychosis — Wellcome Trust. Developing and evaluating generative AI models to safely improve the measurement or treatment of mental health conditions, working in collaboration with clinicians and people with lived experience. (Up to £2,700,000)

  • 2026 – Co-Investigator: Cross-cultural and multilingual mental health safety funded by OpenAI, in collaboration with David Adelani, Annie Lee, Siva Reddy, Tanmoy Chakraborty, and other partners.

  • 2026 – 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)

Fellowships & Scholarships

  • 2026 – U.S.–Africa Frontiers Fellowship, U.S. National Academy of Sciences (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine)
  • 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)

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