Mardiyyah Oduwole


2026

Multimodal AI research has overwhelmingly focused on high-resource languages, hindering the democratization of advancements in the field. To address this, we present AfriCaption, a comprehensive framework for multilingual image captioning in 20 African languages and our contributions are threefold: (i) a curated dataset built on Flickr8k, featuring semantically aligned captions generated via a context-aware selection and translation process; (ii) a dynamic, context-preserving pipeline that ensures ongoing quality through model ensembling and adaptive substitution; and (iii) the AfriCaption model, a 0.5B parametervision-to-text architecture that integrates SigLIP and NLLB200 for caption generation across underrepresented languages. This unified framework ensures ongoing data quality and establishes the first scalable image-captioning resource for underrepresented African languages, laying the groundwork for truly inclusive multimodal AI.

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)
Detecting harmful content on social media plat-forms is crucial in preventing the negative ef-fects these posts can have on social media users. This paper presents our methodology for tack-ling task 10 from SemEval23, which focuseson detecting and classifying online sexism insocial media posts. We constructed our solu-tion using an ensemble of transformer-basedmodels (that have been fine-tuned; BERTweet,RoBERTa, and DeBERTa). To alleviate the var-ious issues caused by the class imbalance inthe dataset provided and improve the general-ization of our model, our framework employsdata augmentation and semi-supervised learn-ing. Specifically, we use back-translation fordata augmentation in two scenarios: augment-ing the underrepresented class and augment-ing all classes. In this study, we analyze theimpact of these different strategies on the sys-tem’s overall performance and determine whichtechnique is the most effective. Extensive ex-periments demonstrate the efficacy of our ap-proach. For sub-task A, the system achievedan F1-score of 0.8613. The source code to re-produce the proposed solutions is available onGithub