Ibrahim Said Ahmad, PhD
University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Bayero University Kano. MasaKhane. HausaNLP.
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. |
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| 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
- Beyond Majority Voting: Agreement-Based Clustering to Model Annotator Perspectives in Subjective NLP TasksTransactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2026
- Going PLACES: Participatory Localized Red Teaming for Text-to-Image Safety in the Global SouthIn Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’26), 2026
- POLAR: A Benchmark for Multilingual, Multicultural, and Multi-Event Online PolarizationIn Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, 2026arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.20624
- AfriHate: A Multilingual Collection of Hate Speech and Abusive Language Datasets for African LanguagesIn 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
- ACIIAnalyzing Cultural Representations of Emotions in LLMs Through Mixed Emotion SurveyIn 2024 12th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), Jul 2024arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.02143. \textbfBest Paper Award
- IP&MMovie Revenue Prediction Based on Purchase Intention Mining Using YouTube Trailer ReviewsInformation Processing & Management, Nov 2020