Main Team

  • Mahmooda Milanzie: Program Project Manager
  • Dr Abiodun Modupe: Co-PI
  • Prof Vukosi Marivate: PI

Collaboration Team

  • Prof Mapundi Banda (Mathematics and Applied Mathematics)
  • Dr Valisoa Rakotonarivo (Mathematics and Applied Mathematics)
  • Dr Mathibele Nchabeleng (Mathematics and 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 (2025): A prototype demo for translating academic abstracts into indigenous African languages.
  • Systematic Review (2025): “Cross-lingual embedding methods and applications: A systematic review for low-resourced scenarios” (Published in Natural Language Processing Journal).
  • Agro-Information QA (2025): “A Few-Shot Learning Approach for a Multilingual Agro-Information Question Answering System”.
  • Award-Winning Research: Our work on isiZulu idioms won the DLI Poster Award at the Deep Learning Indaba in 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

2026 Highlights

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Applied RAG Pilots (2026): New pilots are planned to evaluate retrieval-augmented systems in agriculture and health information support settings across African language contexts.
  • Student Capacity Building (2026): The lab will host focused mentoring and technical writing sessions to accelerate postgraduate publication output and open-source contributions.