Mentorship
Mentors and open topics
NLP researchers in Ethiopia often face a lack of supervisors. Supervisors with NLP experience are scarce inside the country, the literature assumes resources that do not exist for these languages, and a first paper is difficult to write without guidance. Mentorship predates this community's datasets and models, and remains a central part of its work.
- 6 mentors
- 2 open topics
- 9 places this cycle
Mentors by topic
A mentor appears under every area they offered.
Datasets & corpora
3 mentors
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Seid Muhie YimamUniversität Hamburg
Annotation design, Ethio-Semitic morphology, and how to turn a dataset into a paper that reviewers accept.
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Atnafu Lambebo TonjaUniversity College London
Multilingual and low-resource machine translation, and cross-lingual transfer into Ethiopian languages.
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Abinew Ali AyeleBahir Dar University
Corpus construction and annotation for Amharic and Tigrinya, including the consent and anonymisation side.
Language models
4 mentors
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Seid Muhie YimamUniversität Hamburg
Annotation design, Ethio-Semitic morphology, and how to turn a dataset into a paper that reviewers accept.
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Atnafu Lambebo TonjaUniversity College London
Multilingual and low-resource machine translation, and cross-lingual transfer into Ethiopian languages.
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Israel Abebe AzimeSaarland University
Evaluation design, benchmark construction, and reading a results table sceptically.
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Henok Biadglign AdemtewMcGill University & Mila
Applied NLP: retrieval, question answering and getting a prototype in front of users.
Applications
3 mentors
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Abinew Ali AyeleBahir Dar University
Corpus construction and annotation for Amharic and Tigrinya, including the consent and anonymisation side.
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Hellina Hailu NigatuArtificial Intelligence Accountability Lab, Trinity College Dublin
Fairness, harm and the social side of deploying language technology in Ethiopia.
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Henok Biadglign AdemtewMcGill University & Mila
Applied NLP: retrieval, question answering and getting a prototype in front of users.
Evaluation & benchmarks
2 mentors
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Israel Abebe AzimeSaarland University
Evaluation design, benchmark construction, and reading a results table sceptically.
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Hellina Hailu NigatuArtificial Intelligence Accountability Lab, Trinity College Dublin
Fairness, harm and the social side of deploying language technology in Ethiopia.
Capacity building
1 mentor
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Seid Muhie YimamUniversität Hamburg
Annotation design, Ethio-Semitic morphology, and how to turn a dataset into a paper that reviewers accept.
Language & linguistics
2 mentors
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Seid Muhie YimamUniversität Hamburg
Annotation design, Ethio-Semitic morphology, and how to turn a dataset into a paper that reviewers accept.
-
Abinew Ali AyeleBahir Dar University
Corpus construction and annotation for Amharic and Tigrinya, including the consent and anonymisation side.
No topics match that. Try clearing a filter.
What mentors and students agree to
Agreed before a mentorship starts.
Mentee responsibilities
- Come with a direction, however rough. "I want to work on Tigrinya speech" is enough; "give me a topic" is not.
- Expect to read. Early work on a topic is usually reading rather than coding.
- Reply within a week, and say so when you are stuck. Mentorships often lapse because one side stopped replying.
Mentor responsibilities
- A scheduled call at least monthly, and written feedback on drafts.
- A realistic scope: what can be finished in the time available, not what would be impressive.
- Co-authorship where the work warrants it, and a clear statement up front about what would warrant it.
Looking for a mentor
Requesting a mentor
Write to the mentor named on the topic, and copy the mailing list so another mentor can respond if they are at capacity. Say what you have read, what you can build, and how much time you have. Two paragraphs is enough.
If nothing listed fits, describe what you want to work on. Some mentors take students on topics that were not posted.
Offering to mentor
Joining as a mentor
Mentors are not required to be senior. Someone who has finished a thesis in this area can usually help a student starting one, and a PhD student is often a suitable first mentor. Capacity is stated publicly, so mentors are not asked for more than they offered.
Add four keys to your own file in _members/: the areas
you will mentor in, the levels, how many students you can take, and a
sentence on what to ask you about.
To offer a specific topic rather than general supervision, use Post a topic above.