Abinew Ali Ayele


2023

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Natural Language Processing in Ethiopian Languages: Current State, Challenges, and Opportunities
Atnafu Lambebo Tonja | Tadesse Destaw Belay | Israel Abebe Azime | Abinew Ali Ayele | Moges Ahmed Mehamed | Olga Kolesnikova | Seid Muhie Yimam
Proceedings of the Fourth workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL 2023)

This survey delves into the current state of natural language processing (NLP) for four Ethiopian languages: Amharic, Afaan Oromo, Tigrinya, and Wolaytta. Through this paper, we identify key challenges and opportunities for NLP research in Ethiopia.Furthermore, we provide a centralized repository on GitHub that contains publicly available resources for various NLP tasks in these languages. This repository can be updated periodically with contributions from other researchers.Our objective is to disseminate information to NLP researchers interested in Ethiopian languages and encourage future research in this domain.

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SemEval-2023 Task 12: Sentiment Analysis for African Languages (AfriSenti-SemEval)
Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad | Idris Abdulmumin | Seid Muhie Yimam | David Ifeoluwa Adelani | Ibrahim Said Ahmad | Nedjma Ousidhoum | Abinew Ali Ayele | Saif Mohammad | Meriem Beloucif | Sebastian Ruder
Proceedings of the The 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023)

We present the first Africentric SemEval Shared task, Sentiment Analysis for African Languages (AfriSenti-SemEval) - The dataset is available at https://github.com/afrisenti-semeval/afrisent-semeval-2023. AfriSenti-SemEval is a sentiment classification challenge in 14 African languages: Amharic, Algerian Arabic, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Moroccan Arabic, Mozambican Portuguese, Nigerian Pidgin, Oromo, Swahili, Tigrinya, Twi, Xitsonga, and Yorb (Muhammad et al., 2023), using data labeled with 3 sentiment classes. We present three subtasks: (1) Task A: monolingual classification, which received 44 submissions; (2) Task B: multilingual classification, which received 32 submissions; and (3) Task C: zero-shot classification, which received 34 submissions. The best performance for tasks A and B was achieved by NLNDE team with 71.31 and 75.06 weighted F1, respectively. UCAS-IIE-NLP achieved the best average score for task C with 58.15 weighted F1. We describe the various approaches adopted by the top 10 systems and their approaches.