Exploring Transliteration-Based Zero-Shot Transfer for Amharic ASR.
Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Hanan Aldarmaki. (2025). "Exploring Transliteration-Based Zero-Shot Transfer for Amharic ASR." Proceedings of The AfricaNLP Workshop (AfricaNLP) 2025.
CV
Education
- Ph.D in Computer Science, UC Berkeley.
- M.S. in Computer Science, UC Berkeley, 2023.
- B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, AAiT, 2020.
Work experience
- Summer 2024: Visiting Student Researcher
- Mohammed Bin Zayed University of AI (MBZUAI)
- Working on Machine Translation in Healthcare.
- Supervisor: Prof. Monojit Choudhury
Publications
mRAKL: Multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Knowledge Graph Construction for Low-Resourced Languages.
Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Min Li, Maartje Ter Hoeve, Saloni Potdar, Sarah Chasins . (2025). "mRAKL: Multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Knowledge Graph Construction for Low-Resourced Languages." Proceedings of Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2025 Findings.
Cognate Detection for Historical Language Reconstruction of Proto-Sabean Languages: the Case of Ge’ez, Tigrinya, and Amharic
Elleni Sisay Temesgen, Hellina Hailu Nigatu, and Fitsum Assamnew Andargie. (2025). "Cognate Detection for Historical Language Reconstruction of Proto-Sabean Languages: the Case of Ge’ez, Tigrinya, and Amharic" Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 7415–7422, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Exploitation All the Way Down: Calling out the Root Cause of Bad Online Experiences for Users of the Majority World.
Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Zeerak Talat. (2024). Exploitation All the Way Down: Calling out the Root Cause of Bad Online Experiences for Users of the Majority World. Data and AI Governance Coalition (DAIG) at the 19th Annual Meeting of Internet Governance Forum. Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The Zenos Paradox of Low-Resource Languages.
Hellina Nigatu, Atnafu Tonja, Benjamin Rosman, Thamar Solorio, Monojit Choudhury. 2024. The Zenos Paradox of Low-Resource Languages. Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
A Capabilities Approach to Studying Bias and Harm in Language Technologies
Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Zeerak Talat. (2024) A Capabilities Approach to Studying Bias and Harm in Language Technologies. Extended Abstract accepted to Workshop on New Perspectives on Bias and Discrimination in Language Technology. Nov 04, 2024. Amsterdam.
‘I Searched for a Religious Song in Amharic and Got Sexual Content Instead’: Investigating Online Harm in Low-Resourced Languages on YouTube.
Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Inioluwa Deborah Raji. (2024). ""I Searched for a Religious Song in Amharic and Got Sexual Content Instead": Investigating Online Harm in Low-Resourced Languages on YouTube." Proceedings of ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT).
Low-Resourced Languages and Online Knowledge Repositories: A Need-Finding Study.
Hellina Hailu Nigatu, John Canny, Sarah Chasins. (2024). "Low-Resourced Languages and Online Knowledge Repositories: A Need-Finding Study" Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI).
The Less the Merrier? Investigating Language Representation in Multilingual Models.
Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Jugal Kalita. (2023). "The Less the Merrier? Investigating Language Representation in Multilingual Models." Proceedings of Empirical Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2023 Findings.
A Need Finding Study with Low-Resourced Language Content Creators
Hellina Hailu Nigatu, John Canny, Sarah Chasins. (2023). "A Need Finding Study with Low-Resourced Language Content Creators." Proceedings of 4th ACM African Human-Computer Interaction Conference (AfriCHI 2023)
Enhancing Translation for Indigenous Languages: Experiments with Multilingual Models.
Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Olga Kolesnikova, Grigori Sidorov, Alexander Gelbukh, Jugal Kalita. (2023). "Enhancing Translation for Indigenous Languages: Experiments with Multilingual Models." AmericasNLP 2023 Shared Task on Machine Translation into Indigenous Languages.
Co-Designing for Transparency: Lessons from Building a Document Organization Tool for the Criminal Justice Domain.
Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Lisa Pickoff-White, John Canny, Sarah Chasins. (2023). "Co-Designing for Transparency: Lessons from Building a Document Organization Tool for the Criminal Justice Domain." Proceedings of ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT).
DyGraph: a dynamic graph generator and benchmark suite.
Andrew McCrabb, **Hellina Nigatu**, Absalat Getachew, Valeria Bertacco. (2022). "DyGraph: a dynamic graph generator and benchmark suite." Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGMOD Joint International Workshop on Graph Data Management Experiences & Systems (GRADES) and Network Data Analytics (NDA).
The African Stopwords Project: Curating Stopwords for African Languages
Chris Chinenye Emezue, Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Cynthia Thinwa, Lerato Louis, Idris Abdulmumin, Samuel Gbenga Oyerinde, Benjamin Ayoade Ajibade, Helper Zhou, Emeka Felix Onwuegbuzia, Handel Chiagozie Emezue, Ifeoluwatayo Adeseye Ige, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Chiamaka Ijeoma Chukwuneke, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Olanrewaju Samuel. (2022). "The African Stopwords Project: Curating Stopwords for African Languages." 3rd Workshop on African Natural Language Processing.
Talks
Low-Resource Languages and Online Knowledge Repositories: A Need-Finding Study.
Virtual Talk at Wikimedia Research Showcase, Wikimedia Research
Practical State of Language Technologies for “Low-Resourced” Languages.
Virtual Talk at Cornell University, Cornell University, USA
Decolonizing Tech: Interrogating the Impacts of Generative AI on BIPOC Communities
Invited Panel at TAPIA CONFERENCE, San Deigo, USA
Current (Practical) State of Language Technologies for “Low-Resourced” Languages.
In-Person Talk at NYU Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, UAE
Online Experinces of ‘Low-Resourced’ Language Speakers.
Virtual talk at Coher For AI, Virtual
Low-Resourced Languages and Online Knowledge Repositories: A Need Finding Study.
Research talk at NorthEast HCI Meeting, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Starting with the Need: How we can use HCI to inform technological design for low-resourced languages.
Virtual talk at IoTDayWomen2024, Virtual
I Searched for a Religious Language in Amharic and Got Sexual Content Instead: Online Harm in Low-Resourced Languages
Spotlight Talk at Black In AI Workshop, Vancouver, Canada
Challenges and Prospects: Building a Document Organisation Tool for Processing Police sconduct Data
Invited Talk at Ingram Olkin Forum on Police Use of Force, Northfield, Minnisota
DOT: Reflections from Building a Document Organisation Tool in the Criminal Justice Domain
Invited Virtual talk at Datathon4Jusitce, Berkeley, CA
Human-Centered and Ethical NLP for Low-Resourced Languages.
Talk at WhoseKnowledge?, Vitrual
Auditing YouTube Recommendation in Low-Resourced Languages: A Case Study in Amharic.
Virtual Talk at The 7th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms co-located with ACL, Toronto, Canada
Build Your Case: Using AI and HCI to aid Document Organization
Invited talk at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA
Detecting and Exploring Replicated Files in Large Document Dump
Talk at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California
Teaching
Service and leadership
- I am co-organizing SUMEval 2024.
- Served as a mentor for the ACL Student Research Workshop 2024. Check out my mentee, Phakphum Artkaew’s website here.
- I joined the Organizing Committee for WiNLP, where I will serve as co-chair for two years.
- CHI, Reviewer 2024.
- LREC, Reviewer 2024.
- FAccT, Program Committee 2024.
- I am a STEM*FYI Ambassador!!! (2023)
- I am an EECS PEER now! (2023)
- Started Virtual Reading Group with Undergrads from Addis Ababa University on NLP and HCI literature, 2023.
- FAccT Volunteer Chair, 2023
- MVC workshop organizer, 2023
- CHI, Reviewer 2022
- Deep Learning Indaba, Reviewer 2022
- HMCaT at ICML, PC member 2022
- Berkeley NLP Seminar, Organizing Member Since 2022
- NeurIPS ML4D, Reviewer 2021
- Black Graduate Engineering and Science Students (BGESS), E-Board Member Since 2021
- BAIR ReU, Committee Member Since 2021
- JUAMI-Open Compute Facility, Communications Lead 2021-2022.