Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Laurie Burchell, Catherine Arnett, Rafael Mosquera, Sara Hincapié Monsalve, Thom Vaughan, Damian Stewart, Malte Ostendorff, Idris Abdulmumin, Vukosi Marivate, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Hend Al-Khalifa, Nadia Ghezaiel Hammouda, Verrah Akinyi Otiende, Tack Hwa Wong, Jakhongir Saydaliev, Melika Nobakhtian, Muhammad Ravi Shulthan Habibi, Chalamalasetti Kranti, Carol Muchemi, Khang Nguyen, Faisal Muhammad Adam, Luis Frentzen Salim, Reem Alqifari, Cynthia Jayne Amol, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Ilker Kesen, Ahmad Mustafid, Pavel Stepachev, Leshem Choshen, David Anugraha, Hamada Nayel, Seid Muhie Yimam, Vallerie Alexandra Putra, My Chiffon Nguyen, Azmine Toushik Wasi, Gouthami Vadithya, Rob Van Der Goot, Lanwenn ar C’horr, Karan Dua, Andrew Yates, Mithil Bangera, Yeshil Bangera, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Shu Okabe, Fenal Ashokbhai Ilasariya, Dmitry Gaynullin, Genta Indra Winata, Yiyuan Li, Juan Pablo Martínez, Amit Agarwal, Ikhlasul Akmal Hanif, Raia Abu Ahmad, Esther Adenuga, Filbert Aurelian Tjiaranata, Weerayut Buaphet, Michael Anugraha, Sowmya Vajjala, Benjamin L Rice, Azril Hafizi Amirudin, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, Srikant Panda, Yassine Toughrai, Bruhan Kyomuhendo, Daniel Ruffinelli, Akshata, Manuel Goulão, Ej Zhou, Ingrid Gabriela Franco Ramirez, Cristina Aggazzotti, Konstantin Dobler, Jun Kevin, Quentin Pagès, Nicholas Andrews, Nuhu Ibrahim, Mattes Ruckdeschel, Amr Keleg, Mike Zhang, Casper Rufaro Muziri, Saron Samuel, Sotaro Takeshita, Kun Kerdthaisong, Luca Foppiano, Rasul Dent, Tommaso Green, Ahmad Mustapha Wali, Kamohelo Makaaka, Vicky Feliren, Inshirah Idris, Hande Celikkanat, Abdulhamid Abubakar, Jean Maillard, Benoît Sagot, Thibault Clérice, Kenton Murray, Sarah K. K. Luger. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Nedjma Ousidhoum, Idris Abdulmumin, Jan Philip Wahle, Terry Ruas, Meriem Beloucif, Christine de Kock, Nirmal Surange, Daniela Teodorescu, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Alham Fikri Aji, Felermino D. M. A. Ali, Ilseyar Alimova, Vladimir Araujo, Nikolay Babakov, Naomi Baes, Ana-Maria Bucur, Andiswa Bukula, Guanqun Cao, Rodrigo Tufiño, Rendi Chevi, Chiamaka Ijeoma Chukwuneke, Alexandra Ciobotaru, Daryna Dementieva, Murja Sani Gadanya, Robert Geislinger, Bela Gipp, Oumaima Hourrane, Oana Ignat, Falalu Ibrahim Lawan, Rooweither Mabuya, Rahmad Mahendra, Vukosi Marivate, Alexander Panchenko, Andrew Piper, Charles Henrique Porto Ferreira, Vitaly Protasov, Samuel Rutunda, Manish Shrivastava, Aura Cristina Udrea, Lilian Diana Awuor Wanzare, Sophie Wu, Florian Valentin Wunderlich, Hanif Muhammad Zhafran, Tianhui Zhang, Yi Zhou, Saif M. Mohammad. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Kayode Olaleye, Arturo Oncevay, Mathieu Sibue, Nombuyiselo Zondi, Michelle Terblanche, Sibongile Mapikitla, Richard Lastrucci, Charese Smiley, Vukosi Marivate. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Jenalea Rajab, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Everlyn Asiko Chimoto, Dale Dunbar, Graham Morrissey, Fadel Thior, Luandrie Potgieter, Jessica Ojo, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Wilhelmina NdapewaOnyothi Nekoto, Pelonomi Moiloa, Jade Abbott, Vukosi Marivate, Benjamin Rosman. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Nathan Brown, Vukosi Marivate. 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). 2025.

BACKGROUND: Sentence-transformers is a library that provides easy methods for generating embeddings for sentences, paragraphs, and images. Sentiment analysis, retrieval, and clustering are among the applications made possible by the embedding of texts in a vector space where similar texts are located close to one another. This study fine-tunes a sentence transformer model designed for natural language on DNA text and subsequently evaluates it across eight benchmark tasks. The objective is to assess the efficacy of this transformer in comparison to domain-specific DNA transformers, like DNABERT and the Nucleotide transformer. RESULTS: The findings indicated that the refined proposed model generated DNA embeddings that exceeded DNABERT in multiple tasks. However, the proposed model was not superior to the nucleotide transformer in terms of raw classification accuracy. The nucleotide transformer excelled in most tasks; but, this superiority incurred significant computing expenses, rendering it impractical for resource-constrained environments such as low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The nucleotide transformer also performed worse on retrieval tasks and embedding extraction time. Consequently, the proposed model presents a viable option that balances performance and accuracy.

Cheikh M. Bamba Dione, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Peter Nabende, Jesujoba Alabi, Thapelo Sindane, Happy Buzaaba, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Chris Chinenye Emezue, Perez Ogayo, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Catherine Gitau, Derguene Mbaye, Jonathan Mukiibi, Blessing Sibanda, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Andiswa Bukula, Rooweither Mabuya, Allahsera Auguste Tapo, Edwin Munkoh-Buabeng, Victoire Memdjokam Koagne, Fatoumata Ouoba Kabore, Amelia Taylor, Godson Kalipe, Tebogo Macucwa, Vukosi Marivate, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Mboning Tchiaze Elvis, Ikechukwu Onyenwe, Gratien Atindogbe, Tolulope Adelani, Idris Akinade, Olanrewaju Samuel, Marien Nahimana, Théogène Musabeyezu, Emile Niyomutabazi, Ester Chimhenga, Kudzai Gotosa, Patrick Mizha, Apelete Agbolo, Seydou Traore, Chinedu Uchechukwu, Aliyu Yusuf, Muhammad Abdullahi, Dietrich Klakow. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2023.

The problem of unveiling the author of a given text document from multiple candidate authors is called authorship attribution. Manifold word-based stylistic markers have been successfully used in deep learning methods to deal with the intrinsic problem of authorship attribution. Unfortunately, the performance of word-based authorship attribution systems is limited by the vocabulary of the training corpus. Literature has recommended character-based stylistic markers as an alternative to overcome the hidden word problem. However, character-based methods often fail to capture the sequential relationship of words in texts which is a chasm for further improvement. The question addressed in this paper is whether it is possible to address the ambiguity of hidden words in text documents while preserving the sequential context of words. Consequently, a method based on bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM) with a 2-dimensional convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed to capture sequential writing styles for authorship attribution. The BLSTM was used to obtain the sequential relationship among characteristics using subword information. The 2-dimensional CNN was applied to understand the local syntactical position of the style from unlabeled input text. The proposed method was experimentally evaluated against numerous state-of-the-art methods across the public corporal of CCAT50, IMDb62, Blog50, and Twitter50. Experimental results indicate accuracy improvement of 1.07%, and 0.96%, on CCAT50 and Twitter, respectively, and produce comparable results on the remaining datasets.

BACKGROUND: Using visual, biological, and electronic health records data as the sole input source, pretrained convolutional neural networks and conventional machine learning methods have been heavily employed for the identification of various malignancies. Initially, a series of preprocessing steps and image segmentation steps are performed to extract region of interest features from noisy features. Then, the extracted features are applied to several machine learning and deep learning methods for the detection of cancer. METHODS: In this work, a review of all the methods that have been applied to develop machine learning algorithms that detect cancer is provided. With more than 100 types of cancer, this study only examines research on the four most common and prevalent cancers worldwide: lung, breast, prostate, and colorectal cancer. Next, by using state-of-the-art sentence transformers namely: SBERT (2019) and the unsupervised SimCSE (2021), this study proposes a new methodology for detecting cancer. This method requires raw DNA sequences of matched tumor/normal pair as the only input. The learnt DNA representations retrieved from SBERT and SimCSE will then be sent to machine learning algorithms (XGBoost, Random Forest, LightGBM, and CNNs) for classification. As far as we are aware, SBERT and SimCSE transformers have not been applied to represent DNA sequences in cancer detection settings. RESULTS: The XGBoost model, which had the highest overall accuracy of 73 ± 0.13 % using SBERT embeddings and 75 ± 0.12 % using SimCSE embeddings, was the best performing classifier. In light of these findings, it can be concluded that incorporating sentence representations from SimCSE's sentence transformer only marginally improved the performance of machine learning models.

David Adelani, Graham Neubig, Sebastian Ruder, Shruti Rijhwani, Michael Beukman, Chester Palen-Michel, Constantine Lignos, Jesujoba Alabi, Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Peter Nabende, Cheikh M. Bamba Dione, Andiswa Bukula, Rooweither Mabuya, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Blessing Sibanda, Happy Buzaaba, Jonathan Mukiibi, Godson Kalipe, Derguene Mbaye, Amelia Taylor, Fatoumata Kabore, Chris Chinenye Emezue, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Perez Ogayo, Catherine Gitau, Edwin Munkoh-Buabeng, Victoire Memdjokam Koagne, Allahsera Auguste Tapo, Tebogo Macucwa, Vukosi Marivate, Mboning Tchiaze Elvis, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Tosin Adewumi, Orevaoghene Ahia, Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende, Neo Lerato Mokono, Ignatius Ezeani, Chiamaka Chukwuneke, Mofetoluwa Oluwaseun Adeyemi, Gilles Quentin Hacheme, Idris Abdulmumin, Odunayo Ogundepo, Oreen Yousuf, Tatiana Moteu, Dietrich Klakow. Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2022.

This paper proposes the implementation of WordNets for five South African languages, namely, Sepedi, Setswana, Tshivenda, isiZulu and isiXhosa to be added to open multilingual WordNets (OMW) on natural language toolkit (NLTK).The African WordNets are converted from Princeton WordNet (PWN) 2.0 to 3.0 to match the synsets in PWN 3.0.After conversion, there were 7157, 11972, 1288, 6380, and 9460 lemmas for Sepedi, Setswana, Tshivenda, isiZulu and isiXhosa respectively.Setswana, isiXhosa, Sepedi contains more lemmas compared to 8 languages in OMW and isiZulu contains more lemmas compared to 7 languages in OMW.A library has been published for continuous development of African Word-Nets in OMW using NLTK.

Data from online job boards and online professional networks present an opportunity to understand job markets as well as how professionals transition from one job/career to another. We propose a data driven approach to begin to understand a slice of the South African job market. We do this by analysing data from career websites as well as a South African online professional networks. Our goals are to be able to group jobs given their descriptions, characterise career paths as well as to have some building blocks to be able to extract job position hierarchies given a description.

In the Bitcoin network, lack of class labels tend to cause obscurities in anomalous financial behaviour interpretation. To understand fraud in the latest development of the financial sector, a multifaceted approach is proposed. In this paper, Bitcoin fraud is described from both global and local perspectives using trimmed k-means and kd-trees. The two spheres are investigated further through random forests, maximum likelihood-based and boosted binary regression models. Although both angles show good performance, global outlier perspective outperforms the local viewpoint with exception of random forest that exhibits nearby perfect results from both dimensions. This signifies that features extracted for this study describe the network fairly.