Atnafu Lambebo Tonja

Google DeepMind Academic Fellow
University College London · London, UK

I work on natural language processing for the world's under-resourced languages: corpora, multilingual language models and culturally grounded evaluation benchmarks for African and Indigenous languages, and speech and multimodal systems for communities that mainstream NLP usually leaves out.

Before joining UCL, I was a postdoctoral researcher at MBZUAI in the UAE, working with Prof. Thamar Solorio. I hold a PhD in Computer Science from Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico, where I was advised by Prof. Alexander Gelbukh and Prof. Olga Kolesnikova.

News

2026Two papers at ACL 2026: Afri-MCQA, which received a Social Impact Paper Award, and CommonLID.
2026Joined University College London as a Google DeepMind Academic Fellow.
2025Joined MBZUAI as a postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Thamar Solorio.
2025NAACL 2025: ProverbEval, on LLM evaluation for low-resource languages.
2024NeurIPS 2024 Datasets & Benchmarks: CVQA, a culturally diverse multilingual VQA benchmark.
2024Two papers at EMNLP 2024: The Zeno’s Paradox of “Low-Resource” Languages, which received an Outstanding Paper Award, and Walia-LLM.

Earlier news

2024LREC-COLING 2024: EthioLLM.
2023Two papers at EMNLP 2023, one in TACL (AfriSpeech-200) and one at INTERSPEECH (AfriNames); Best Paper Award at IJCNLP-AACL 2023 for MasakhaNEWS.

Selected publications

Afri-MCQA: Multimodal Cultural Question Answering for African Languages

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Srija Anand, Emilio Villa-Cueva, Israel Abebe Azime, Jesujoba O. Alabi, …, Alham Fikri Aji, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Thamar Solorio

ACL 2026 · ★ Social Impact Paper Award

Project Data BibTeX
The Zeno’s Paradox of “Low-Resource” Languages

Hellina H. Nigatu, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Benjamin Rosman, Thamar Solorio, Monojit Choudhury

EMNLP 2024 · ★ Outstanding Paper Award

BibTeX
InkubaLM: A Small Language Model for Low-Resource African Languages

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Jessica Ojo, Jenalea Rajab, Fadel Thior, Eric P. Wairagala, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Pelonomi Moiloa, Jade Abbott, Vukosi Marivate, Benjamin Rosman

Preprint
EthioLLM: Multilingual Large Language Models for Ethiopian Languages with Task Evaluation

Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Israel Abebe Azime, Tadesse D. Belay, Mesay Gemeda Yigezu, et al.

LREC-COLING 2024

BibTeX
MasakhaNEWS: News Topic Classification for African Languages

David I. Adelani, Marek Masiak, Israel Abebe Azime, Jesujoba O. Alabi, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Christine Mwase, Odunayo Ogundepo, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Akintunde Oladipo, …, Pontus Stenetorp

IJCNLP-AACL 2023 · ★ Best Paper Award · Area Chair Award (Resources & Evaluation)

All publications →