Joan Nwatu
Author directory2026
AtlasNLP: A Country-Aware Atlas of Dataset Representation in NLP
Joan Nwatu | Tsedeniya Solomon Amare | Longju Bai | Bontu Fufa Balcha | Zayd Bashir | Angana Borah | Zara Burzo | Yubin Choi | Naihao Deng | Samika Gupta | Michel Faloughi | Claude Kwizera | Ziqiao Ma | Cynthia Yacel Fuertes Panizo | Ellie Seehorn | Hui Shen | Jiayi Tang | Zesen Zhao | Boyuan Zheng | Rada Mihalcea
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Joan Nwatu | Tsedeniya Solomon Amare | Longju Bai | Bontu Fufa Balcha | Zayd Bashir | Angana Borah | Zara Burzo | Yubin Choi | Naihao Deng | Samika Gupta | Michel Faloughi | Claude Kwizera | Ziqiao Ma | Cynthia Yacel Fuertes Panizo | Ellie Seehorn | Hui Shen | Jiayi Tang | Zesen Zhao | Boyuan Zheng | Rada Mihalcea
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Understanding which countries are represented in NLP datasets is essential for identifying gaps, targeting data collection, measuring progress, and informing AI policy. However, geographic metadata is very rarely available, and country-level representation is often hidden behind broad language-level claims. We introduce **AtlasNLP**, a country-aware atlas of over 13,000 NLP dataset records across normalized NLP task categories, tracking both the populations represented and where datasets are produced. AtlasNLP includes **AtlasNLP-Gold**, a human-curated reference set, and **AtlasNLP-Core**, an ACL-derived large-scale collection. Using this resource, we show that (1) dataset coverage is highly uneven across countries and tasks; (2) dataset production and representation are geographically asymmetric; and (3) language coverage does not imply geographic representation. These findings reveal blind spots in current dataset documentation practices and motivate more explicit geographic metadata for country-aware NLP evaluation.
The Language–Energy Divide: Measuring Energy Costs of Multilingual LLM Inference
Naihao Deng | Alissa Shen | Yiming Feng | Joan Nwatu | Jae-Won Chung | Mosharaf Chowdhury | Yulong Chen | Rada Mihalcea
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Naihao Deng | Alissa Shen | Yiming Feng | Joan Nwatu | Jae-Won Chung | Mosharaf Chowdhury | Yulong Chen | Rada Mihalcea
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in multilingual settings, yet the energy costs of serving these models across different languages remain poorly understood. We present a systematic study of inference energy consumption across languages with ML.Energy framework (CITATION). We find striking disparities: energy consumption per output token varies by up to 8.3× across languages, while total energy for a fixed set of requests varies by up to 179× between the cheapest (English, 17.6 kJ) and the most expensive (Pashto, 3,147 kJ) languages. Our analysis shows that this disparity is driven by two compounding factors: (1) higher per-token energy costs for languages using complex or rare scripts, and (2) more tokens generated for low-resource languages. Moreover, we find a double penalty: languages with the highest energy footprints also tend to achieve the lowest task accuracy. We reveal that the energy divide persists across models, hardware, and tasks, suggesting a systemic energy inequity in multilingual LLM deployment. Finally, we recommend that the community treat energy as a first-class evaluation axis, extend reporting checklists and model cards to include it, and adopt deployment-side mitigations for better energy efficiency.
2025
Uplifting Lower-Income Data: Strategies for Socioeconomic Perspective Shifts in Large Multi-modal Models
Joan Nwatu | Oana Ignat | Rada Mihalcea
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Joan Nwatu | Oana Ignat | Rada Mihalcea
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Recent work has demonstrated that the unequal representation of cultures and socioeconomic groups in training data leads to biased Large Multi-modal (LMM) models. To improve LMM model performance on underrepresented data, we propose and evaluate several prompting strategies using non-English, geographic, and socioeconomic attributes. We show that these geographic and socioeconomic integrated prompts favor retrieving topic appearances commonly found in data from low-income households across different countries leading to improved LMM model performance on lower-income data. Our analyses identify and highlight contexts where these strategies yield the most improvements.
2023
Bridging the Digital Divide: Performance Variation across Socio-Economic Factors in Vision-Language Models
Joan Nwatu | Oana Ignat | Rada Mihalcea
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Joan Nwatu | Oana Ignat | Rada Mihalcea
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Despite the impressive performance of current AI models reported across various tasks, performance reports often do not include evaluations of how these models perform on the specific groups that will be impacted by these technologies. Among the minority groups under-represented in AI, data from low-income households are often overlooked in data collection and model evaluation. We evaluate the performance of a state-of-the-art vision-language model (CLIP) on a geo-diverse dataset containing household images associated with different income values (DollarStreet) and show that performance inequality exists among households of different income levels. Our results indicate that performance for the poorer groups is consistently lower than the wealthier groups across various topics and countries. We highlight insights that can help mitigate these issues and propose actionable steps for economic-level inclusive AI development.