Bontu Fufa Balcha
2026
Evaluating Machine Translation Datasets for Low-Web Data Languages: A Gendered Lens
Hellina Hailu Nigatu | Bethelhem Yemane Mamo | Bontu Fufa Balcha | Debora Taye Tesfaye | Elbethel Daniel Zewdie | Ikram Behiru Nesiru | Jitu Ewnetu Hailu | Senait Mengesha Yayo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Hellina Hailu Nigatu | Bethelhem Yemane Mamo | Bontu Fufa Balcha | Debora Taye Tesfaye | Elbethel Daniel Zewdie | Ikram Behiru Nesiru | Jitu Ewnetu Hailu | Senait Mengesha Yayo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
As low-resourced languages are increasingly incorporated into NLP research, there is an emphasis on collecting large-scale datasets. But in prioritizing quantity over quality, we risk 1) building language technologies that perform poorly for these languages and 2) producing harmful content that perpetuates societal biases. In this paper, we investigate the quality of Machine Translation (MT) datasets for three low-resourced languages–Afan Oromo, Amharic, and Tigrinya, with a focus on the gender representation in the datasets. Our findings demonstrate that while training data has a large representation of political and religious domain text, benchmark datasets are focused on news, health, and sports. We also found a large skew towards the male gender–in names of persons, the grammatical gender of verbs, and in stereotypical depictions in the datasets. Further, we found harmful and toxic depictions against women, which were more prominent for the language with the largest amount of data, underscoring that quantity does not guarantee quality. We hope that our work inspires further inquiry into the datasets collected for low-resourced languages and prompts early mitigation of harmful content. WARNING: This paper contains discussion of NSFW content that some may find disturbing.
2025
ProverbEval: Exploring LLM Evaluation Challenges for Low-resource Language Understanding
Israel Abebe Azime | Atnafu Lambebo Tonja | Tadesse Destaw Belay | Yonas Chanie | Bontu Fufa Balcha | Negasi Haile Abadi | Henok Biadglign Ademtew | Mulubrhan Abebe Nerea | Debela Desalegn Yadeta | Derartu Dagne Geremew | Assefa Atsbiha Tesfu | Philipp Slusallek | Thamar Solorio | Dietrich Klakow
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Israel Abebe Azime | Atnafu Lambebo Tonja | Tadesse Destaw Belay | Yonas Chanie | Bontu Fufa Balcha | Negasi Haile Abadi | Henok Biadglign Ademtew | Mulubrhan Abebe Nerea | Debela Desalegn Yadeta | Derartu Dagne Geremew | Assefa Atsbiha Tesfu | Philipp Slusallek | Thamar Solorio | Dietrich Klakow
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
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- Negasi Haile Abadi 1
- Henok Biadglign Ademtew 1
- Israel Abebe Azime 1
- Tadesse Destaw Belay 1
- Yonas Chanie 1
- Derartu Dagne Geremew 1
- Jitu Ewnetu Hailu 1
- Dietrich Klakow 1
- Bethelhem Yemane Mamo 1
- Mulubrhan Abebe Nerea 1
- Ikram Behiru Nesiru 1
- Hellina Hailu Nigatu 1
- Philipp Slusallek 1
- Thamar Solorio 1
- Debora Taye Tesfaye 1
- Assefa Atsbiha Tesfu 1
- Atnafu Lambebo Tonja 1
- Debela Desalegn Yadeta 1
- Senait Mengesha Yayo 1
- Elbethel Daniel Zewdie 1