Ibrahim Said Ahmad, PhD

University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Bayero University Kano. MasaKhane. HausaNLP.

prof_pic.jpg

UW-Stevens Point

2100 Main St

Stevens Point, WI 54481

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computing and New Media Technologies at UW–Stevens Point. From 2023 to 2025, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Northeastern University’s Institute for Experiential AI, where I led research at the intersection of natural language processing (NLP) and computational social science. My work focused on addressing linguistic and cultural disparities in AI systems, particularly for low-resource languages.

During my postdoc, I developed foundational resources, including AfriHate and ArtElingo-28, and worked on the cultural alignment of large language models (LLMs). I also co-organized SemEval shared tasks.

I co-founded HausaNLP and Arewa Data Science, initiatives that enable me to collaborate with researchers and practitioners to advance NLP and data science for low-resource languages.

From 2014 to 2023, I served as a lecturer at Bayero University Kano, where I taught courses in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and database systems, and mentored graduate students on research projects. During my PhD at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, I proposed predictive models for movie revenue prediction using social media data.

My work has been supported by over $400,000 in competitive grants from Google Research, Lacuna Fund, and Oracle. One of my papers was also selected as the Best Paper in the ACII 2025 conference, and another received Honorable Mention for Best Paper in SemEval 2024, as part of Shared Task I co-organized.

news

Jul 07, 2026 Our POLAR work won two awards at ACL 2026: the Best Paper Award at the 9th Workshop on Event Extraction and Understanding, and the Best Paper Runner-Up Award for the POLAR SemEval shared task.
May 15, 2026 Our paper, POLAR: A Benchmark for Multilingual, Multicultural, and Multi-Event Online Polarization, was accepted to Findings of ACL 2026.
Mar 15, 2026 Our paper, Beyond Majority Voting: Agreement-Based Clustering to Model Annotator Perspectives in Subjective NLP Tasks, was accepted to Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL).
Feb 10, 2026 Our paper, Going PLACES: Participatory Localized Red Teaming for Text-to-Image Safety in the Global South, was accepted to FAccT 2026.
Oct 15, 2025 Our SemEval-2026 Task 9 proposal, POLAR: Detecting Multilingual, Multicultural and Multievent Online Polarization, was accepted.

latest posts

selected publications

  1. Beyond Majority Voting: Agreement-Based Clustering to Model Annotator Perspectives in Subjective NLP Tasks
    Tadesse Destaw Belay, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Idris Abdulmumin, and 6 more authors
    Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2026
  2. Going PLACES: Participatory Localized Red Teaming for Text-to-Image Safety in the Global South
    Charvi Rastogi, Mukul Bhutani, Minsuk Kahng, and 13 more authors
    In Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’26), 2026
  3. ACL
    POLAR: A Benchmark for Multilingual, Multicultural, and Multi-Event Online Polarization
    Usman Naseem, Juan Ren, Saba Anwar, and 9 more authors
    In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, 2026
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.20624
  4. AfriHate: A Multilingual Collection of Hate Speech and Abusive Language Datasets for African Languages
    Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Idris Abdulmumin, Abinew Ali Ayele, and 24 more authors
    In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), Apr 2025
  5. ACL
    BRIGHTER: BRIdging the Gap in Human-Annotated Textual Emotion Recognition Datasets for 28 Languages
    Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Nedjma Ousidhoum, Idris Abdulmumin, and 8 more authors
    In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), Jul 2025
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.11926
  6. ACII
    Analyzing Cultural Representations of Emotions in LLMs Through Mixed Emotion Survey
    Shiran Dudy, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Ryoko Kitajima, and 1 more author
    In 2024 12th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), Jul 2024
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.02143. \textbfBest Paper Award
  7. No Culture Left Behind: ArtELingo-28, a Benchmark of WikiArt with Captions in 28 Languages
    Youssef Mohamed, Runjia Li, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, and 4 more authors
    In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Nov 2024
  8. IP&M
    Movie Revenue Prediction Based on Purchase Intention Mining Using YouTube Trailer Reviews
    Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Azuraliza Abu Bakar, and Mohd Ridzwan Yaakub
    Information Processing & Management, Nov 2020