David Ifeoluwa Adelani Mcgill

Professor David Ifeoluwa Adelani is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University, a Core Academic Member at MILA, and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair (2024). His research focuses on multilingual natural language processing and speech processing, with a strong emphasis on low-resource and underrepresented languages. Professor Adelani’s work began with a focus on NLP for African languages during his Ph.D. at Saarland University and has since expanded to include languages from South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Indigenous communities in the Americas. His research addresses both foundational and practical challenges in multilingual NLP, including language modeling, evaluation benchmarks, speech–text processing, and post-training strategies for large language and vision-language models in low-resource settings. He has published extensively at top-tier venues such as ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, COLM, EACL, Interspeech, and ASRU, with multiple best paper and shared task awards recognizing the impact of his contributions. Before joining McGill, Professor Adelani was a DeepMind Academic Fellow at University College London (UCL). His research aims to make modern AI systems more inclusive and globally representative by improving language technologies for communities that have historically been underserved by NLP research. Their research directions are illustrated by key works including "The BigScience ROOTS Corpus: A 1.6TB Composite Multilingual Dataset", and "AfriSenti: A Twitter Sentiment Analysis Benchmark for African Languages".