About Me

Hi there👋! My name is Joy Naomi Olusanya. I am a linguist and NLP research engineer. I hold a Bachelor's degree in Linguistics from Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria. My research focuses on developing more efficient and robust NLP models for low-resource African languages. I engage in dataset curation, evaluation pipelines, and multilingual NLP systems with a focus on underrepresented and African languages.

My work spans automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), machine translation (MT), code-switching, and code-mixing for low-resource African languages. I am particularly interested in computational linguistics, multilingual NLP, LLM evaluation, and culturally aware AI systems. More broadly, I am passionate about leveraging AI to preserve languages and cultures, expand digital inclusion, and advance responsible AI governance through impactful, community-grounded research.

I am also the Founder and CEO of the Center for Low-Resource Languages and Cultures (CLRLC), an initiative dedicated to advancing research, building language resources, and strengthening communities around underrepresented languages worldwide.

Beyond research and engineering, I actively contribute to AI and NLP communities across Africa and beyond through teaching, mentorship, and community-driven initiatives. In 2025, I served as Workshop Chair for the CLRLC-LLMs Workshop at NeurIPS 2025, organised by the CLRLC community. I currently serve as Training Manager and NLP Researcher at Tonative, where I design curricula, oversee tutors and teach. I also mentor beginners in AI, particularly students transitioning from linguistics into NLP and language technology research.

News

Research Interests

• Machine Translation & Multilingual NLP
• Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) & Tone Processing for African Languages
• Large Language Models (LLMs) for Low-resource Languages
• Cultural & Figurative Language Understanding
• AI Safety, Evaluation & Responsible AI for African Languages
• Dataset Creation, Language Documentation & Linguistic Annotation

Publications

• The Last Translation Benchmark
  Vilém Zouhar, Niyati Bafna, et al. arXiv preprint 2026 arXiv ↗
• Activation Editing for Low-Resource Cross-Lingual Machine Translation: Does JoLA Transfer?
  Joy Olusanya, Erika Germinario, Pooja Srinivas, Praveenkumar Kondikoppa, Shreyas Jagadeep Shete, Steven Lawrence Fernandes WiML Symposium @ ICML 2026 2026 Paper ↗
• Tone in Yoruba ASR: Evaluating the Impact of Tone Recognition on Transformer-Based ASR Models
  Joy Olusanya LoResLM Workshop @ EACL 2026 2026 Google Scholar ↗
• OWE-YOR: Leveraging Transformer-Based Models for Yorùbá Proverb Classification
  Joy Olusanya, Daud Abolade WiML Workshop @ NeurIPS 2025 2025 Google Scholar ↗

Talks

ÒWE-YOR: Leveraging Transformer-Based Models for Yorùbá Proverb Classification

Poster presentation at Deep Learning Indaba, Kigali, Rwanda, earning the 🏆 Best Poster Award for work on culturally grounded Yorùbá proverb classification.

View Publication →

An Introspective Look at the African AI Landscape Workshop

Served as a panelist at Deep Learning Indaba 2026, Lagos, Nigeria, in a workshop titled "An Introspective Look at the African AI Landscape".

View Workshop Details →

Computational Linguistics & NLP

Invited to speak at the Language in the Digital Age workshop, hosted by the Linguistics and African Languages Students' Association at Obafemi Awolowo University.

View Talk Slides → View Workshop Details →

Roadmap to DSN AI Bootcamp 2026

Invited to speak at Data Science Nigeria OAU × MIVA Chapters AI Bootcamp 2026 preparation, guiding participants through qualification tracks, strategy, and submission requirements.

View More → View Talk Slides →

Teaching

I actively teach and develop educational materials on AI, NLP, Deep Learning and Linguistics. Below are my lecture slides delivered to learners across various skill levels.

• Introduction to Deep Learning DSN OAU Chapter

  Lecture slides introducing core concepts of deep learning, neural network fundamentals, activation functions, backpropagation, and practical applications. Delivered to students at Obafemi Awolowo University.

  View Slides ↗
• Fundamentals of Neural Networks DSN OAU Chapter

  A foundational lecture on neural network architectures, perceptrons, multilayer networks, forward and backward propagation, and hands-on examples to build intuition from the ground up.

  View Slides ↗
• Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence & Natural Language Processing Tonative Data Academy

  An accessible introduction to AI and NLP covering the history of AI, core NLP tasks, language models, and real-world applications, with examples drawn from African language contexts.

  View Slides ↗
• Introduction to Data & Types of NLP Datasets Tonative Data Academy

  A practical lecture on data for NLP types of datasets, annotation methods, quality control, dataset creation pipelines, and the particular challenges of building data for low-resource African languages.

  View Slides ↗

Community Service

Skills & Tools

Experience

• Leadership

• Founder & CEO 2026 – Present
  Center for Low-Resource Languages and Cultures (CLRLC) · Nigeria
  • Leading initiatives focused on low-resource language research, preservation, and AI development.
  • Coordinating research, community, and educational programs for multilingual and low-resource languages.
  • Building collaborations that promote linguistic diversity and inclusive NLP innovation across Africa and beyond.
• Workshop Organiser June 2026
  Tonative Workshop @ Deep Learning Indaba 2026
  • Part of the organising team for a Tonative Workshop @ Deep Learning Indaba 2026.
  View Workshop →
• Workshop Chair September 2025
  CLRLC-LLMs Workshop @ NeurIPS 2025 · Mexico City, Mexico
  • Established an international research workshop accepted at NeurIPS 2025 focused on advancing low-resource language technologies and cultural representation in large language models (LLMs).
  • Coordinated the program committee, invited speakers, and interdisciplinary collaborations across academia and industry.
  • Designed the technical workshop structure, including speaker sessions, lightning talks, and community engagement activities.

• Research Experience

• NLP Researcher & Yorùbá Language Lead Aug 2025 – Present
  Tonative · Nigeria (Remote)
  • Developed multilingual NLP datasets for low-resource African languages, ensuring linguistic diversity.
  • Applied NLLB-200M for machine translation from English to Kikuyu, Kinyarwanda, and Yorùbá using the XNLI dataset for evaluation and research publication.
  • Benchmarked models using OpenAI healthcare datasets to evaluate performance and data quality.
  • Directed data annotation and validation workflows to produce high-quality Yoruba datasets.
• AI Developer Jan 2024 – Mar 2025
  Brilla AI Project, Kwame AI · Ghana (Remote)
  • Validated and curated diverse speech datasets to improve transcription accuracy and model reliability.
  • Built reproducible preprocessing and evaluation pipelines for scalable experimentation.

• Industry Experience

• AI / LLM Developer Apr 2025
  Atom Group (Contract) · Nigeria (Remote)
  • Developed a commercial AI agent with Instagram scraping pipelines for social media intelligence.
  • Built modular automation systems for large-scale data collection and API integration.
• ML / NLP Engineer Jun 2024 – Dec 2024
  Rendo AI Nigeria · Nigeria (Remote)
  • Designed Python-based web scraping pipelines using Requests, Selenium, and BeautifulSoup.
  • Automated large-scale data acquisition workflows, improving efficiency and dataset completeness.

Projects

• llm evaluation

  Evaluating LLM Performance on Nigerian Pidgin Sentiment

  Benchmarks GPT-4o-mini on Nigerian Pidgin English (Naija) sentiment classification using zero-shot prompting across 2,000 stratified samples. Achieves 63.2% accuracy and 0.55 Macro F1.

  View Project →
• machine translation

  English–Portuguese Machine Translation

  Fine-tuned Helsinki-NLP's MarianMT (opus-mt-tc-big-en-pt) on the Pirá dataset using Hugging Face Transformers. Implemented full training pipeline including preprocessing, tokenisation, Seq2Seq training, and BLEU evaluation with qualitative sample comparisons between baseline and fine-tuned outputs.

  View Project →
• chatbot

  NaijaBot — Nigerian Pidgin Chatbot

  A multi-mode AI chatbot that speaks Nigerian Pidgin English (Naija) natively, built for culture, conversation, storytelling, and language learning. Features four specialised modes: General Chat, Nigerian Culture, Folktales & Proverbs, and Pidgin Tutor.

  View Project →

Mentorship

I am currently serving as a mentor for the NeurIPS 2026 Affinity Group Mentorship program, guiding mentees on their research paper submissions. I also served as a mentor (in person) at Deep Learning Indaba 2026.

• Mentee: Stacy Cheruto NeurIPS 2026 Affinity Group Mentorship
• Mentee: Marvellous Ajala NeurIPS 2026 Affinity Group Mentorship
• Mentee: Yousra Farhani NeurIPS 2026 Affinity Group Mentorship

Blog

Writing on African NLP, language technology, AI research, and the human side of building in tech. Published on Medium ↗

• Code and Compass: Starting Out in Tech Career · Tech

  A personal reflection on beginning a journey in tech, the challenges, the lessons, and what it really means to find your footing in a fast-moving field.

• From Proposal to Workshop: My Journey as Workshop Chair at CLRLC-LLMs, NeurIPS 2025 Research · Community

  Behind the scenes of organising an international research workshop at NeurIPS, from writing the proposal to the day itself in Mexico City.

• Date and Time Manipulation with Python Python · Programming

  A practical guide to working with dates and times in Python covering the datetime module, timezone handling, formatting, and real-world use cases.