Hellina Hailu Nigatu

Hellina Hailu Nigatu

CS PhD Student at UC Berkeley. Working on HCI, NLP and AI Ethics.

Sitemap

A list of all the posts and pages found on the site. For you robots out there is an XML version available for digesting as well.

Pages

Posts

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Upcoming blog on the experience of being an African student pursuing PhD in CS abroad.

portfolio

Gender Aware, Community Centered Approach to Machine Translation

I will be using my FAccT DEI Scholar fund to implement a 1-year research project with 2 MSc and 2 BSc women students from Addis Ababa Institute of Technology. The project will center on building gender-aware and community-centered MT tools for Ethiopian languages.

Zeyneb Library

I used my SIGHPC Computational and Data Science Fellowship to build a Library in memory of my late Grandmother; read more about it here.

publications

The African Stopwords Project: Curating Stopwords for African Languages

Published in 3rd Workshop on African Natural Language Processing, 2022

This paper is about the number 1. The number 2 is left for future work.

Recommended citation: 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.
Download Paper | Download Slides

DyGraph: a dynamic graph generator and benchmark suite.

Published in Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGMOD Joint International Workshop on Graph Data Management Experiences & Systems (GRADES) and Network Data Analytics (NDA)., 2022

Recommended citation: 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).
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Co-Designing for Transparency: Lessons from Building a Document Organization Tool for the Criminal Justice Domain.

Published in Proceedings of 4th ACM African Human-Computer Interaction Conference (AfriCHI 2023), 2023

Recommended citation: 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).
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Enhancing Translation for Indigenous Languages: Experiments with Multilingual Models.

Published in AmericasNLP 2023 Shared Task on Machine Translation into Indigenous Languages., 2023

Recommended citation: 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.
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A Need Finding Study with Low-Resourced Language Content Creators

Published in Proceedings of 4th ACM African Human-Computer Interaction Conference (AfriCHI 2023), 2023

Recommended citation: 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)
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‘I Searched for a Religious Song in Amharic and Got Sexual Content Instead’: Investigating Online Harm in Low-Resourced Languages on YouTube.

Published in Proceedings of ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT). , 2024

Recommended citation: 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).
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A Capabilities Approach to Studying Bias and Harm in Language Technologies

Published in Workshop on New Perspectives on Bias and Discrimination in Language Technology, 2024

Recommended citation: 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.
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The Zenos Paradox of Low-Resource Languages.

Published in Proceedings of The 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2024), 2024

Recommended citation: 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.
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Exploitation All the Way Down: Calling out the Root Cause of Bad Online Experiences for Users of the Majority World.

Published in The 19th annual Meeting of Internet Governance Forum., 2024

Recommended citation: 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.
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talks

teaching

TA for AddisCoder

Summer Program, Menen School, 2023

Volunteered as a TA for the AddisCoder 2023 summer program in Addis Ababa, teaching highschool students from across the country python fundamentals and algorithms.

Human-Centered & Ethical Low-Resource NLP

Undergraduate and Graduate course, Addis Ababa Institute of Technology, ECES, 2023

Designed and taught a course at AAiT for BSc and MSc students. Click the title to see the syllabus.

Intro to CS

, UC Berkeley and Kaplan University Partners, 2023

Gave a guest Lecture for an online intro to CS course for high school students.

Data Science for Social Justice

Workshop, UC Berkeley, D-Lab, 2024

Senoir Fellow for the DSSJ 2024 summer program where I co-teach and co-mentor students on fundamenatals of langauge processing and readings related to Fairness Accountability and Transparency.