call · 3 November 2026
Call for collaborators: are AI assistants overlooking Ethiopian small businesses?
Walelign Tewabe Sewunetie is looking for collaborators on an empirical study for the AfricaNLP 2027 workshop, co-located with ACL/EACL.
The project asks whether conversational AI assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot) systematically overlook Ethiopian small and medium-sized enterprises that operate in Amharic and Afaan Oromoo on informal platforms such as Telegram and Facebook Marketplace, compared with formal, English-first businesses.
Four open roles
Three carry a co-author track; the fourth is a collaborator track.
Native Amharic NLP researcher or speaker — co-lead commercial query localisation, Ge’ez orthographic validation and morpho-syntactic checking. Evaluate model output accuracy and hallucination rates in Amharic responses.
Native Afaan Oromoo NLP researcher or linguist — co-lead query localisation and prompt engineering in Qubee orthography, validate idiomatic business terminology, assist with regional merchant directory mapping (Adama, Bishoftu and others), and audit linguistic errors in generated responses.
Research assistant / empirical data curator — compile a ground-truth dataset of 200 to 300 verified Ethiopian SMEs across Addis Ababa and regional commercial hubs. Verify physical storefronts and active Telegram channels, and audit model hallucinations, including phantom businesses and invented phone numbers.
Digital commerce or development economics specialist (collaborator track) — work on the socio-technical analysis of informal digital commerce, mobile money adoption including Telebirr, and the economic effects of algorithmic gatekeeping on indigenous African businesses.
Commitment and authorship
Dataset curation and model auditing run through the fourth quarter of 2026, with the submission finalised in early 2027. Authorship is earned, following the ACL contribution guidelines.
How to apply
Send a short note with your academic background, language proficiencies and research interests to waleligntewabe@gmail.com.
The deadline is 10 November 2026.