Advancing Afrocentric Natural Language Processing to develop inclusive AI that ensures African languages are structurally represented and digitally empowered worldwide.

Ife Adebara is an Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta and a Fellow at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii). She holds a PhD in Linguistics (Cognitive Systems) from the University of British Columbia, where her dissertation, Towards Afrocentric Natural Language Processing, laid the foundation for her research on inclusive language technologies. She also holds master’s degrees in Computer Science from Simon Fraser University and the University of Birmingham, and a BA in Linguistics from the University of Ibadan.

Ife’s research focuses on building inclusive and explainable language technologies for low-resource and underrepresented languages, with particular emphasis on African and Indigenous languages. Her work addresses challenges in ethical data curation, model development, language policy, and AI governance. She leads the development of large-scale multilingual systems such as AfroLID, Serengeti, and Cheetah, which support more than 500 African languages and language varieties.

Her research has been published in leading venues including ACL, EMNLP, and COLING. She serves as an organizer of the Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP workshop, and contributes as an ad-hoc member to UNESCO’s International Decade of Indigenous Languages. She is the recipient of multiple international recognitions, including IRCAI’s Global Top 100 Outstanding AI Solutions under UNESCO auspices and the AI for Good Diversity, Equity & Inclusion AI Leader of the Year 2023 Award.

Outside academia, Ife is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of EqualyzAI, where she develops agentic AI systems grounded in Africa’s most comprehensive language datasets.