--- title: "Jesujoba Alabi — author profile and papers" description: "Jesujoba Alabi, Saarland University: 4 papers on Elamur Research (2022–2023), h-index 11 — affiliations, topics, co-authors and who cites them in our…" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/jesujoba-alabi/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/jesujoba-alabi/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [authors](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/) / Jesujoba Alabi # Jesujoba Alabi Jesujoba Alabi works in natural language processing for languages that large models serve poorly, with a strong focus on African languages. Their papers here ask how pre-trained multilingual models can be extended to languages they barely saw in training, how scarce annotated data can be stretched through cross-lingual transfer, and how to build test sets that let researchers measure progress on many languages at once. The methods combine continued pre-training, fine-tuning on small curated datasets, and the construction of human-annotated corpora and benchmarks, placing the work within [Multilingual & cross-lingual NLP](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/multilingual-nlp/). The most cited paper, [Adapting Pre-trained Language Models to African Languages via Multilingual Adaptive Fine-Tuning](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/alabi-2022-adapting-pre-trained-language-models/), replaces one-model-per-language adaptation with a single model trained jointly on many African languages alongside a few high-resource ones. It also trims vocabulary for unneeded scripts to shrink the model considerably. [A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way!](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/adelani-2022-few-thousand-translations-go-long/) examines how pre-trained translation systems can be extended to unseen African languages and shifted from mostly religious parallel text toward the news domain. [MasakhaNER 2.0](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/adelani-2022-masakhaner-2-0-africa-centric/) provides a news-domain named entity corpus for languages across Sub-Saharan Africa and studies which source languages transfer best, testing linguistic and geographic predictors. The newest work moves from individual tasks toward broad evaluation. [SIB-200](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/adelani-2023-sib-200-simple-inclusive-big/) builds a topic classification benchmark covering more than two hundred languages and dialects by labelling English sentences from a multi-way parallel corpus and projecting the labels onto every translation. This gives many low-resource languages their first public test data for language understanding. Alabi is based at [Saarland University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/saarland-university/), with earlier bylines at the [Max Planck Institute for Informatics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/labs/max-planck-institute-for-informatics/), the [German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/labs/german-research-centre-for-artificial-intelligence/) and the [University of Ibadan](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-ibadan/). The most frequent collaborator on these papers is [David Ifeoluwa Adelani](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/david-ifeoluwa-adelani/). Other co-authors include [Dietrich Klakow](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/dietrich-klakow/) and Peter Nabende. Jesujoba Alabi has 4 papers in our library, in 2022–2023, most of them on [Multilingual & cross-lingual NLP](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/multilingual-nlp/), [Named entity recognition](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/named-entity-recognition/), [Language models & pretraining](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/language-models/); often with [David Ifeoluwa Adelani](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/david-ifeoluwa-adelani/), [Dietrich Klakow](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/dietrich-klakow/), [Peter Nabende](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/peter-nabende/). 4 papers in our library · 2022–2023 [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/A5055769964) · [**h-index 11**](https://openalex.org/authors/A5055769964) · [113 works](https://openalex.org/works?filter=author.id:A5055769964) · [1,190 citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=author.id:A5055769964&sort=cited_by_count:desc) OpenAlex, 2026-10-14 [📄 4 works in our library](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/jesujoba-alabi/#papers) · [🔗 1,956 citations in our library](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/jesujoba-alabi/cited-by/) · [11 more in our library without a page yet](#also) · [⭐ Paper Star rank #2621](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/paper-stars/page/27/#star-2621) The profile is the library's match of the name; two people with one name are not always told apart. Elsewhere: [Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=search_authors&mauthors=Jesujoba+Alabi) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/search?q=Jesujoba+Alabi) · [dblp](https://dblp.org/search?q=Jesujoba+Alabi) · [ACL Anthology](https://aclanthology.org/search/?q=Jesujoba+Alabi) ## Affiliations [🎓**Saarland University** Saarbrücken · Germany 2020–2026 · 60 papers*current*](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/saarland-university/) · [🔬**Max Planck Institute for Informatics** Saarbrücken · Germany 2021–2024 · 6 papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/labs/max-planck-institute-for-informatics/) · [🔬**Max Planck Society** Munich · Germany 2021–2024 · 2 papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/labs/max-planck-society/) · [🔬**Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique** Le Chesnay-Rocquencourt · France 2022 · 2 papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/labs/institut-national-de-recherche-en-sciences-et-technologies-du-numerique/) · [🔬**German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence** Kaiserslautern · Germany 2020 · 2 papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/labs/german-research-centre-for-artificial-intelligence/) · [🎓**University of Ibadan** Ibadan · Nigeria 2018 · 2 papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-ibadan/) From the bylines of their papers (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14), ORCID and Wikidata; institutions on papers are matched by machine. 1 more institution on single bylines are not listed. ## Topics [Multilingual & cross-lingual NLP (2)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/multilingual-nlp/) · [Named entity recognition (1)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/named-entity-recognition/) · [Language models & pretraining (1)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/language-models/) ## Works by year ### 2020s [**2023** 1 paper](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/adelani-2023-sib-200-simple-inclusive-big/) · [**2022** 3 papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/jesujoba-alabi/year/2022/) ## Papers The most cited first (OpenAlex and our library). 1. **[Adapting Pre-trained Language Models to African Languages via Multilingual Adaptive Fine-Tuning](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/alabi-2022-adapting-pre-trained-language-models/)** *(2022 · 195 citations)* Multilingual PLMs such as XLM-R still perform poorly on many African languages, especially those absent from pre-training. 2. **[A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way! Leveraging Pre-trained Models for African News Translation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/adelani-2022-few-thousand-translations-go-long/)** *(2022 · 155 citations)* Large multilingual translation models are trained mostly on web-crawled text, so many African languages with millions of speakers are absent or barely represented. 3. **[MasakhaNER 2.0: Africa-centric Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognition](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/adelani-2022-masakhaner-2-0-africa-centric/)** *(2022 · 150 citations)* African languages have over a billion speakers but very few annotated NER resources, and it is unclear which source language to use when transferring models across languages. 4. **[SIB-200: A Simple, Inclusive, and Big Evaluation Dataset for Topic Classification in 200+ Languages and Dialects](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/adelani-2023-sib-200-simple-inclusive-big/)** *(2023 · 135 citations)* Multilingual language models now cover hundreds of languages, but most evaluation benchmarks include only a few dozen. ## Also in our library 11 more works of theirs are in our library without a page here yet; they will appear as we publish them. ## Co-authors here 12 of 20 co-authors with a page, the most papers together first. - [David Ifeoluwa Adelani](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/david-ifeoluwa-adelani/) ×4 - [Dietrich Klakow](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/dietrich-klakow/) ×2 - [Peter Nabende](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/peter-nabende/) ×2 - [Xiaoyu Shen](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/xiaoyu-shen/) ×2 - [Angela Fan](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/angela-fan/) - [Annie En-Shiun Lee](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/annie-en-shiun-lee/) - [Chester Palen-Michel](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/chester-palen-michel/) - [Constantine Lignos](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/constantine-lignos/) - [Ernie Chang](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/ernie-chang/) - [Freshia Sackey](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/freshia-sackey/) - [Graham Neubig](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/graham-neubig/) - [Hannah Liu](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/hannah-liu/) ## Cited by Papers of our library cite their works 1,956 times (of the 140,884 papers whose bibliographies we read); [164 citing papers with a page here →](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/jesujoba-alabi/cited-by/).