Fuad Mire Hassan


2026

Lemmatization, which reduces words to their root forms, plays a key role in tasks such as information retrieval, text indexing, and machinelearning-based language models. However, a key research challenge for low-resourced languages such as the Somali is the lack of human-annotated lemmatization datasets and reliable ground truth to underpin accurate morphological analysis and training relevant NLP models. To address this problem, we developed the first large-scale, purpose-built Somali lemmatization lexicon, coupled with a crowdsourcing platform for ongoing expansion. The system leverages Somali’s agglutinative and derivational morphology, encompassing over5,584 root words and 78,629 derivative forms, each annotated with part-of-speech tags. For data validation purpose, we have devised a pilot lexicon-based lemmatizer integrated with rule-based logic to handle out-of-vocabulary terms. Evaluation on a 294-document corpuscovering news articles, social media posts, and short messages shows lemmatization accuracies of 51.27% for full articles, 44.14% forexcerpts, and 59.51% for short texts such as tweets. These results demonstrate that combining lexical resources, POS tagging, and rulebased strategies provides a robust and scalable framework for addressing morphological complexity in Somali and other low-resource languages

2023

MasakhaNEWS: News Topic Classification for African languages
David Ifeoluwa Adelani | Marek Masiak | Israel Abebe Azime | Jesujoba Alabi | Atnafu Lambebo Tonja | Christine Mwase | Odunayo Ogundepo | Bonaventure F. P. Dossou | Akintunde Oladipo | Doreen Nixdorf | Chris Chinenye Emezue | Sana Al-azzawi | Blessing Sibanda | Davis David | Lolwethu Ndolela | Jonathan Mukiibi | Tunde Ajayi | Tatiana Moteu | Brian Odhiambo | Abraham Owodunni | Nnaemeka Obiefuna | Muhidin Mohamed | Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad | Teshome Mulugeta Ababu | Saheed Abdullahi Salahudeen | Mesay Gemeda Yigezu | Tajuddeen Gwadabe | Idris Abdulmumin | Mahlet Taye | Oluwabusayo Awoyomi | Iyanuoluwa Shode | Tolulope Adelani | Habiba Abdulganiyu | Abdul-Hakeem Omotayo | Adetola Adeeko | Abeeb Afolabi | Anuoluwapo Aremu | Olanrewaju Samuel | Clemencia Siro | Wangari Kimotho | Onyekachi Ogbu | Chinedu Mbonu | Chiamaka Chukwuneke | Samuel Fanijo | Jessica Ojo | Oyinkansola Awosan | Tadesse Kebede | Toadoum Sari Sakayo | Pamela Nyatsine | Freedmore Sidume | Oreen Yousuf | Mardiyyah Oduwole | Kanda Tshinu | Ussen Kimanuka | Thina Diko | Siyanda Nxakama | Sinodos Nigusse | Abdulmejid Johar | Shafie Mohamed | Fuad Mire Hassan | Moges Ahmed Mehamed | Evrard Ngabire | Jules Jules | Ivan Ssenkungu | Pontus Stenetorp
Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)