28.06.2024
I touched down in heaven. When I started research it was because I couldn’t communicate with my mum from Russia. 4 years later, my contributions made it happen. Mum, this is for you 🙏🏿🥰
Thank you for everyone who helped & thanks
@iseeaswell
for the acknowledgement
Et c’est fait ! Vous pouvez désormais traduire le français ou n’importe quelle autre langue en Fongbé directement depuis Google Translate.
Le Fongbé est l’une des langues les plus parlées au Bénin 🇧🇯.
Par ici :
GG
@bonadossou
,
@FabroniYoc
et à tous !
Officially not going for a PhD this year. All applications rejected … It feels weird but definitely it’s for the best. And I won’t give up on that dream
😅It didn’t take long apparently. Well I’ll be joining
@GoogleAI
in January, as a graduate student researcher. I’ll be working on Sub-Saharan languages with
@seb_ruder
, Clara Rivera, and other amazing people I’m already excited to meet 🤩
Ph.D Life update: For the rest of my PhD, I’ll be joining the
@mcgillu
CS NLP group working under the supervision of Prof. Jackie Cheung on NLP for low-resource languages and Health+AI 🫶🏾The switch wasn’t an easy decision but I’m happy, excited and looking forward to it!
After working with Yoshua, I’ve officially met
@ylecun
@AIatMeta
- his session and advices to PhD students were both insightful and intriguing to me (😅 the fact we shouldn’t work on llms and surprisingly JEPAs 😅). I’ve gotten food for thoughts to think deeper.
Thanks
@ylecun
I wanted to share some positive news. I woke up with this great news. My Master’s thesis
@jacobs_bremen
received the « Dean’s Prize for outstanding Masters theses 2022 »
🥳
I am in awe this morning. 2020 is made of many dreams that came true, and here I am again proud to share that I've been accepted as intern at MILA.
Everyone who helped in this coming true, I love you all <3. It is a new challenge; the real work starts now.
I can't wait !!!
I officially graduated today. I am proud of myself because yes I think I’ve achieved a lot in a year or two. And I’m looking forward to more. Will be happy sharing amazing news with you soon.
Active learning for NLP is very understudied.
I’m getting more emails from people interested in that direction. I’m happy I didn’t listen to people telling me I was wrong to know, from early days in my PhD, what I wanted to focus on 😇
7 months in, 2 papers already submitted
5/5 of my submissions have been accepted at African NLP, EACL 2021. 3/5 are personal works:
1. End-to-End Speech Recognition for Fon and Igbo w/
@ChrisEmezue
2. Word Embedding Models Fon and Nobiin w/
@M___Sabry
3. Crowdsourced Phrase-Based Tokenization for Fon w/
@ChrisEmezue
1/ We're (
@ChrisEmezue
and I) delighted to share with you that our paper "MMTAfrica: Multilingual Machine Translation for African Languages" has been accepted to appear at WMT 2021 🥳🤩 👇🏾👇🏾
Okwugbé, first ASR initiative for Fon and Igbo is now available. Such a nice work with
@ChrisEmezue
.
We open-source codes and data to encourage similar works on low-resourced African Languages 🤗.
Fon:
Igbo:
We open-sourced the code and datasets of our recent
#EMNLP22
paper `AfroLM` at . You can also access the AfroLM model on HuggingFace () and our datasets () as well.
Today, I visited the Reinforcement Learning Lab of University of Witwatersrand, the biggest AI research lab in Africa: a place which produced not only many modern ML minds, but which is also rich in history 😋
w/
@alienelf
, George Konidaris,
@BenjaminRosman
🙌🏿
You can misread the
#ACL2022NLP
acceptance rates to conclude that Findings is more selective than the main track, as it appears to have a lower acceptance rate. (Please, don't pay attention to acceptance rates, folks. And my condolences to anyone who works in a system that does.)
We made it happen 😋 Officially graduated. BSc Degree in Maths with Distinctions 😍 This is what we came for, and we made it ❤ and are already ready for the next.
Doesn’t happen everyday so I’m super excited to be a keynote speaker at the African Data Summit which will take place in my home country Benin, on June 14th. I’ll be presenting virtually about my research works in language and vision
So
#EMNLP2021
is just three days away 😍 So excited? Who else is coming? I'd love to make connections 😎
This will be my first in-person conference ever and w/
@ChrisEmezue
we will presenting our ASR system on Fon and Igbo (WiNLP), and our MMTAfrica on 6 African Languages (WMT)
🎉 Big congrats!
The 'MasakhaNEWS: News Topic Classification for African languages' paper by David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Marek Masiak et al. wins the Area Chair Award(Resources and Evaluation) at
#AACL2023
!
I think research companies are missing out very much by making PhD a requirement in research positions. PhD is absolutely great, not undermining it but research needs curiosity and a constant will to learn - this is something a degree can’t and doesn’t guarantee!
A small win, but maybe still worth celebrating ? I’m finalist (one of the 8, and out of 450 applications) of the World Literacy Foundation Awards, in the category of “Academic Research Recognition”. An award I hope to add to the existing list, stay tuned 🙌🏿👐🏿
1/3 I'm thrilled to announce my book detailing my journey from Benin to impactful achievements in AI, with a special focus on healthcare and language technologies for underrepresented African languages. It’s already available for preorder
1/ We (
@ChrisEmezue
and I) are delighted to officially introduce you, the FFRTranslate: the first Neural Machine Translation engine from Fon to French and vice-versa.
Official website:
1/3 In 2020, I started working on Fon & built the first machine translation for Fon. I made a promise to get Fon on Google Translate & it’s becoming a reality.
@Google
@GoogleAI
announced adding 110 new languages to Google Translate, including Fon. It’s a huge proud moment for me
So apparently I’ll be giving the graduation speech for Class’22 🫣 and guess what ? Dad’s gonna be there 🥺🥹 Can’t wait to see this man cry of pride
🥹 This morning is going wonderfully well
(1/) So here it's: my 2020 adventure. Hope this helps to learn more about my journey, achievements and future expectations. I believe that I'd have time now for relaxation (as many people already take me as a robot🤣). I hope you'll enjoy!
It’s a wrap at
#EMNLP2022
. What a year it’s been 😱 I set myself many goals that’ve been achieved in many ways. Hardship revealed real ones, self-worth and letting go brought me so many amazing opportunities I’m grateful for. Time to cool off, and get ready for the next cycle 🙌🏿
1/ New paper to be presented at
#EMNLP2022
@SustaiNLP2022
Active Learning for Language Modeling. In the paper, we leverage the efficiency of active learning in the process of training multilingual large pre-trained models.
Attending
@NeurIPSConf
this/next week - I’ll be giving a keynote on low-resource NLP at the
@globalsouthinai
and lightning talk
@SymposiumML4H
Interested in low-resource NLP and ML for Healthcare (Drug Discovery, Gêne Therapy, Medical Imaging, etc) ? Let’s meet and talk 👋🏿
Proud I was able to take part in this competition. Hopefully our solutions bring up closer to safe and efficient AI-based health solutions 🙏🏿
Cc
@Mila_Quebec
@McGill_CIM
@PVG_McGill
We are pleased to announce the top 3 winners of High Risk Breast Cancer Prediction Contest 1 - csabAIbio,
@bonadossou
and PKU-Edinburgh. The winners are awarded $10,000 in cash prizes. Congratulations to the winners and all 42 participating teams!
3 years ago when I first published FFR w/
@ChrisEmezue
, Fon wasn’t known.
Wikipedia in Fon will soon be a thing with several pages translated 🤙🏿Another proud moment of the impact of our research and efforts to promote our language 🇧🇯
cc:
@TontonJars
@iamyourclounon_
@hgilles06
1/n: New preprint of our paper « Graph-Based Active Machine Learning Method for Diverse and Novel Antimicrobial Peptides Generation and Selection ». In this work, we leverage the efficiency of Graph Connected Components to cluster and select diverse sets of Antimicrobial Peptides
I have reviewed at ALL major ML and NLP conferences, in some of them I have even been in review committees - is this something worth mentioning in a resume or CV?
I wish was
@timnitGebru
in Mila slack now - I raised the issue and 🤦🏾♂️ I’m just shocked because some think it’s “normal” but happy that the majority is not okay with it.
Things have to change
You have a powerful prof. who is doing that publicly, with screenshots sent to me by concerned people, & you want students who don’t have such powers to trust you & come to you with their “concerns” while this unfolded publicly?
I definitely wouldn’t if I were such a student.
I was almost lucky/blessed to get a visa to attend in person in Dublin. Canada will be even less accessible to underrepresented communities (eg people in Africa who can’t be supported by their universities etc). What will
@aclmeeting
do to help with that?
Those messsges of my dad at 3 am calling me Dr Dossou (when I think of it he’s always called me this way since I was kid) and telling me he’s very extremely proud of me 🥰🥰🥰
Met someone in the Metro of Marseilles - he is in NLP as well, and told me he followed my work which for him is truly inspiring ❤️. This really brought extra sunshine to my afternoon which had already been amazing.
1/ I think we’ve (
@shodeiyanuoluwa
and I) been already patient enough - so I’m getting it to public attention:
@IJCAIconf
please reimburse us. I’ve attended all major ML/NLP conference this year and no reimbursement process has been so chaotic and in my opinion disrespectful.
3 years ago, this community helped me to achieving my dream of attending my MSc program. To this same community, today I’m asking for help on the behalf of a friend,
@diversekhaulat
- even 1$ can go a long way & please do not hesitate to share. GFM link:
Glad to announce that our paper « MeSH2Matrix: Machine learning-driven biomedical relation classification based on the MeSH keywords of PubMed scholarly publications » has been accepted at BIR proceedings of the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) 2022
And here it goes. I am delighted to receive the Jacobs University Community Award 2021 for Innovation, Cultural Understanding, and Diversity🥰 I'm officially part of the
@jacobs_bremen
Hall of Fame
Not a single African language is cited - African representation is really worrying. I’m optimistic that personal efforts,
@MasakhaneNLP
’s and many others will turn the wheel. 7k languages but none of the 31% most spoken is highlighted.
There are 7,000+ known living languages. This diagram shows the # of native speakers for each language. More people speak a dialect of Chinese than speak English natively. This makes me wonder how much is lost in translation.
Source: SCMP data on 6.3 billion people (of 7.9 bil).
《The future in AI is self-supervised》said
@ylecun
3 challenges in AI today:
1. Learning with fewer labeled samples and/or fewer trials
2. AI systems capabilities to "reason"
3. Learning to plan complex action sequences.
Great talk at
@iclr_conf
of Prof
@ylecun
So today after 5/9 months of internship, I got these feedbacks:
Advisor 1: "We're converging to a paper"
Advisor 2: "I think your internship is extremely successful. I think you've even chance for one of the Nature journals
😭All in the same day, I'm in awe 😍
1/3 I'm thrilled to announce my book detailing my journey from Benin to impactful achievements in AI, with a special focus on healthcare and language technologies for underrepresented African languages. It’s already available for preorder
Our fine-tuned Wav2Vec2-Large-XLSR for Fon is now available on
@huggingface
.
It achieved a WER of 14.97, after few hours of training. Thank you
@huggingface
for putting everything down and
@ChrisEmezue
for the training, and results.
Link:
Forced myself to take a break, forced myself to be « lazy »: just laying, eating, walks, listening to music, normal discussions (well a few research ones sneaked in 😅).
Research can be overwhelming, it’s okay to remember the world won’t stop moving if we decide to get off