Ethio NLP

Ethiopia

Why EthioNLP?

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is one of the core component of AI. There are efforts throughout the world to conduct NLP for Ethiopian languages but without a formal communication among researchers. At COLING 2018, Santa Fe, USA, three researchers from Addis Ababa University (Binyam), University of Hamburg (Seid), and University of Trento (Surafel) took an initiative to create a formal NLP society for Ethiopian language NLP research.

✔ Ethiopia is a country with multinational and multilingual that support more that 83 different languages

✔ All the languages are underrepresented in NLP application. Now, EthioNLP is a well-organized and research oriented community


Our Focus Areas

NLP Corpus and Dataset Creation

Language Model Building

Research & Collaboration

Assist Education Quality

Academy to Industry Linkage

Marketplace for Professionals




Our Mission

Our mission is to advance the understanding and application of natural language processing technologies to foster innovation and growth in the field. Our community goals are but not limited to:

✔ Identify, prioritize and focus on NLP research topics for Ethiopian languages

✔ Organize workshops, seminars, and conferences for Ethiopic NLP researches

✔ Join efforts among Ethiopian NLP related researchers around the world

✔ Supporting and mentoring students in NLP and data science research.

✔ Bringing the NLP community working on Ethiopian languages together

✔ Coordinating resources for Ethiopian language research.

✔ Collaborate with Ethiopian universities and assist education quality

✔ Suggest and participate in possible Ethiopian NLP researches

✔ Setting goals, priorities, and tracks on Ethiopian language NLP

📣 Call for Abstract

The 1st EthioNLP Workshop at ICES22

Workshop Dates: September 29 – October 03, 2025

Location: Hawassa University, Ethiopia

Conference Short Name: EthioNLP-ICES22

🔗 Abstract Submission Link: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/EthioNLP2025

Ethiopia is a multinational and multilingual country that supports more than 83 different languages, yet all these languages remain underrepresented in NLP global research. In this digital world, NLP is one of the core components of AI that is rapidly advancing every aspect of our lives. There are efforts worldwide to conduct NLP for Ethiopian languages, but there is no formal communication among researchers. EthioNLP is a research-oriented community focusing on developing NLP for Ethiopian languages. In addition to conducting research in collaboration among the EthioNLP members, organizing workshops, seminars, and conferences for Ethiopic NLP researchers is the central pillar of the community.

EthioNLP is organizing the first Current Status and Future Directions in Natural Language Processing for Ethiopian Languages (EthioNLP) workshop, which will be co-located with the 22nd International Conference of Ethiopian Studies (ICES22).

Workshop: Current Status and Future Directions in NLP for Ethiopian Languages
Co-located with: ICES22 — Hawassa University, Ethiopia
Dates: September 29 – October 03, 2025

Aims of the workshop:

  • To bring global attention to Ethiopian language research, forge new collaborative networks, and define future research trajectories.
  • To showcase work being done by the EthioNLP community
  • To support ongoing studies and mentor MSc and PhD students in NLP and data science research and present their works
  • To collaborate with research experts in the area and strengthen the EthioNLP community
  • To collaborate with Ethiopian universities and assist education quality
  • To gather experts and discuss the latest research, encouraging interdisciplinary research to foster future collaborations
  • To bridge academia and industry to enhance the practical applications of NLP technologies in local contexts.

Topics of Interest Include (but not limited to):

  • Challenges or solutions for resource gathering for Ethiopian languages and NLP tasks
  • Analyses of Ethiopian languages using computational linguistics
  • New resources (corpora and dataset) for Ethiopian languages
  • Multilingual NLP techniques for Ethiopian languages
  • Tutorials for Ethiopian NLP for education or development purposes
  • Development of NLP systems for Ethiopian languages for production
  • Building and evaluation language models for Ethiopian languages
  • Evaluation of NLP techniques for downstream NLP tasks for Ethiopian languages (Machine Translation, speech recognition, POS tagging, NER, sentiment analysis, etc.)
  • Empirical studies reporting results from adapting developed high-resource languages NLP to Ethiopian languages
  • Crowdsourcing and open-sourcing data collection and preprocessing tools/software for Ethiopian NLP
  • Language model bias and ethical considerations for Ethiopian NLP

🗓 Important Dates

  • Abstract submission deadline: May 20, 2025
  • Review period: May 20 – June 15, 2025
  • Decision notification: June 15, 2025
  • Full paper/abstract submission deadline: July 30, 2025
  • Workshop date: Sep 29 – Oct 03, 2025

📝 Submission Details

We accept new, unpublished works in two formats:

  • Extended Abstracts (up to 2 pages) — to be included in ICES22 Book of Abstracts
  • Full Papers (4–8 pages) — optional full-length version

📬 Organizers

  • Dr. Martha Yifru Tachebele, Associate Professor, Addis Ababa University
  • Dr. Michael Melese Woldeyohannis, Assistant Professor, Addis Ababa University
  • Dr. Seid Muhie Yimam, Technical Lead, University of Hamburg, HCDS
  • Dr. Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Postdoc, MBZUAI & Lelapa AI
  • Abinew Ali Ayele, PhD Student, University of Hamburg & Bahir Dar University
  • Israel Abebe Azime, PhD Student, Saarland University
  • Hellina Hailu Nigatu, PhD Candidate, University of California
  • Tadesse Destaw Belay, PhD Student, IPN, Mexico
  • Henok Biadglign Ademtew, Research Engineer, Vella AI
  • And many more from the EthioNLP Team

📞 Contact

📋 Author and Submission Guidelines

Authors should prepare their manuscripts according to standard scientific paper formats. Full papers can be between 4-8 pages, and extended abstracts up to 2 pages. All submissions should be original and not simultaneously submitted to another conference. The conference language is English.
Papers should be formatted according to the conference style guidelines and submitted in PDF format. Ensure to remove any identifying information for blind review. Full papers and extended abstracts should be submitted through the CMT system.

Where to Submit: CMT submission link: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/EthioNLP2025

How to Submit: Authors need to create a CMT account. Please refer to How to create a CMT account.

CMT Acknowledgment: The Microsoft CMT service was used for managing the peer-review process for this conference. This service was provided for free by Microsoft, including costs for Azure cloud services as well as for software development and support.