The Team & Scientific Outputs
THE COLLECTIVE
The team & scientific outputs.
Main Team
Prof Vukosi Marivate
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Dr Abiodun Modupe
CO-PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Mahmooda Milanzie
PROGRAM PROJECT MANAGER
Collaboration Team
Prof Mapundi Banda
Mathematics & Applied Mathematics
Dr Valisoa Rakotonarivo
Mathematics & Applied Mathematics
Dr Mathibele Nchabeleng
Mathematics & Applied Mathematics
Dr Nomadlozi Bokaba
African Languages
Tebogo Macucwa
African Languages
Prof Chijioke Okorie
Private Law
Meet Our Researchers
We are proud to support a diverse group of postgraduate students and fellows pushing the boundaries of African NLP.
| Researcher | Level | Focus Area |
|---|---|---|
| Abebe Tegene | Postdoc | Mathematical & Computational Models for Low-Resourced Languages |
| Fiskani Banda | PhD | Language-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) |
| Thapelo Sindane | PhD | Automatic South African Sign Language (SASL) Translation |
| Penelope Matloga | PhD | Domain-Adaptive Sentiment Analysis for Low-Resource Languages |
| Nontokozo Manukuza | Masters | IsiZulu Idiom-Aware NLP Pipelines |
| Risuna Nkolele | Masters | Child Speech Recognition for African Languages (AfriHuBERT) |
| Zion van Wyk | Honours | Data Augmentation for isiZulu Automatic Speech Recognition |
Key Outputs & Publications
UPTranslate: a prototype for translating academic abstracts into indigenous African languages
Cross-lingual embedding methods and applications: a systematic review for low-resourced scenarios
A Few-Shot Learning Approach for a Multilingual Agro-Information Question Answering System
isiZulu idiom research — DLI Poster Award, Deep Learning Indaba Kigali
Community & Events
Hundzula Retreat
A technical convening for African researchers focused on NLP advances.
SWiP Workshop
Collaborative event with SADiLaR and Wikipedia to advance South African languages in digital spaces.
News
01
India Collaboration Visit
2026
The lab is preparing an international collaboration visit to strengthen research partnerships on multilingual NLP, low-resource model evaluation, and responsible AI for public-interest applications.
02
Expanded Speech Data Program
2026
We are scaling speech data collection and quality validation workflows to improve robustness for child speech and multilingual recognition benchmarks.
03
Applied RAG Pilots
2026
New pilots are planned to evaluate retrieval-augmented systems in agriculture and health information support settings across African language contexts.
04
Student Capacity Building
2026
The lab will host focused mentoring and technical writing sessions to accelerate postgraduate publication output and open-source contributions.