About me

Welcome

Seid Muhie Yimam, Ph.D.

ሰይድ ሙሄ ይማም

Technical Lead, Hub of Computing and Data Science (HCDS)
Research Associate, Language Technology Group, University of Hamburg
Visiting Professor, Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN), Mexico

Short intro:

Seid Muhie Yimam, Ph.D., is the Technical Lead at the Hub of Computing and Data Science (HCDS) and a Research Associate in the Language Technology Group at the University of Hamburg. He also serves as a Visiting Professor at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN) in Mexico and maintains active research collaborations with several Ethiopian universities, where he contributes to PhD student supervision, course teaching, and joint research activities. His research spans Natural Language Processing, artificial intelligence, and data science, with a particular emphasis on low-resource languages, multilingual and multimodal NLP, explainable and responsible AI, and AI-driven innovation for social impact, including health care applications.

Dr. Yimam is a member of Masakhane and has played an active role in advancing African NLP through community-driven research and collaboration. His work includes leading several SemEval shared tasks, publishing in major ACL venues, and contributing to award-winning research at the forefront of low-resource and multilingual NLP. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Hamburg, and his doctoral thesis received the GSCL Award for Best Doctoral Thesis. He has also been recognized with Best Paper Awards, including the Deep Learning Indaba Best Paper Award and the SemEval 2025 Best Task Paper Award. Through his sustained leadership in research, teaching, and international collaboration, Dr. Yimam contributes to the application and integration of AI across multiple domains, with a special focus on low-resource settings and languages.

Research interests

Low-resource languages

Natural Language Processing for low-resource settings and languages, with active work on African NLP through Masakhane and community-driven research.

Multilingual & multimodal NLP

Multilingual and multimodal language technology, including leading several SemEval shared tasks and publishing at major ACL venues.

Explainable & responsible AI

Explainable and responsible artificial intelligence, spanning NLP, AI and data science.

AI for social impact

AI-driven innovation for social impact, including health care applications, and international collaboration in research and teaching.

Research at a glance

If you would like to explore all my 115 publications clustered by topic, click any of the topics in the diagram below.

Announcements

• 🧑‍🏫 2–7 Aug 2026 Data, Culture, and Community — Interactive Exhibition of the AfricaNLP Playbook and Annotation ToolDeep Learning Indaba 2026 · Pan-Atlantic University, Lagos, NigeriaAn interactive exhibition of the AfricaNLP Playbook and the AfriAnnotate annotation tool, covering how African-language datasets are designed, annotated and released by and with the community.
• 🌍 2–7 Aug 2026 AfriPolar — Reflective Talk on Polarization ResearchDeep Learning Indaba 2026 · Pan-Atlantic University, Lagos, NigeriaA reflective talk on polarization research for African languages, drawing on the POLAR benchmark and the AI Map project.

News

• 🏆 July 2026 Seid Muhie Yimam and colleagues won the Best Paper Award at EEUCA 2026 @ ACL 2026 for "POLAR: A Benchmark for Multilingual, Multicultural, and Multi-Event Online Polarization", a large-scale benchmark for studying online polarization across 22 languages, cultures, and events.
• 🥈 July 2026 Seid Muhie Yimam and colleagues also earned the Best Paper Runner-Up Award at SemEval 2026 for the POLAR shared task (Task 9) on detecting multilingual, multicultural, and multi-event online polarization.
• 🎉 February 2026 Seid Muhie Yimam and colleagues have a strong presence at EACL 2026 in multilingual and inclusive AI, with multiple accepted papers—including several AfricaNLP Workshop contributions on healthcare NLP, low-resource languages, and community-driven research.
• 🎉 November 2025 Seid Muhie Yimam co-authored papers at EMNLP 2025 in Suzhou, China, including AfroXLMR-Social (adapting pre-trained language models for African social media text) and A Case Against Implicit Standards (homophone normalization in machine translation for Ge'ez-script languages).
• 🌍 October 2025 Seid Muhie Yimam undertook an international research collaboration visit to IIT Kharagpur (October–November 2025) under the SPARC-funded project "Deep Neural Multilingual Models to Combat Online Hate Content", delivering guest lectures and talks.
• 🎉 September 2025 Seid Muhie Yimam is co-organizing a shared task at SemEval 2026, Task 9 on Detecting Multilingual, Multicultural, and Multi-Event Online Polarization (POLAR).
• 🏆 August 2025 Seid Muhie Yimam and colleagues received the Best Paper Award at the Deep Learning Indaba 2025 for "The State of Large Language Models for African Languages: Progress and Challenges".
• 🏆 July 2025 Seid Muhie Yimam and colleagues received the Best Task Award at ACL 2025 in Vienna for SemEval-2025 Task 11, the shared task on bridging the gap in text-based emotion detection.
• 🎉 May 2025 Seid Muhie Yimam co-authored papers at ACL 2025, where HCDS and Language Technology were well represented with 11 accepted papers; his contributions include CULEMO (Cultural Lenses on Emotion) and LECTURE4ALL.
• 🫱🏼‍🫲🏻 Sep 1 - 7 2024 Seid Muhie Yimam will attend the Deep Learning Indaba (DLI) event, in Dakar, Senegal from September 1-7, 2024. He will present the following works:
  1. 🧑‍🏫 AM-DETOX: Analyzing Amharic Text Detoxification Using Pre-trained Large Language Models,
  2. 🧑‍🏫 Sentiment and Hate Speech datasets for more than 14 African languages,
  3. 🧑‍🏫 AI4Democracy: Dynamic Dashboard for Analyzing Polarization and Extremism in Online Media,
  4. 🧑‍🏫 and SEMEVAL-2025: Bridging the Gap in Text-Based Emotion Detection
• 🎉 July 2024 Seid Muhie Yimam leads INNOVETH: Innovative Health Intervention for Ethiopian Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East, selected for funding among 23 projects from 130 applications under the Transdisciplinary Approaches to Mobility and Global Health call.
• 🎉 April - May 2024 Seid Muhie Yimam has successfully conducted the Summer School for Women in AI and Data Sceince at AASTU: Summer School for Women in AI and Data Science.
• 🎉 December 2023 Seid Muhie Yimam has been accepted as a member of the CODATA International Data Policy Committee (IDPC)
• 🎉 October 2023 Seid Muhie Yimam has been granted a Google Research explorCSR and TensorFlow exploreCSR addon grant.