About
I am a Senior Lecturer (≈ Assistant Professor) in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Cape Town. My research area is Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. My current research focuses on language modelling for low-resource languages, modelling knowledge and linguistic structure in text, and creating language resources and models for South African and African languages.
Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington, working with Yejin Choi. I completed my PhD at the University of Oxford, supervised by Phil Blunsom. Before that I obtained Masters and undergraduate degrees in Computer Science at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa.
Recent Reviewing (2025/2026)
ACL ARR (SAC), SACAIR, LREC, CoLM (AC), Computational Linguistics (AE).
UCT Teaching (2026)
CSC2001F Data Structures · CSC3043Z Large Language Models, Probabilistic AI · CSC5035Z Natural Language Processing.
News
- May 2026We released MzansiLM, an open-source decoder-only 125M-parameter language model covering all 11 official written South African languages.
- Dec 2025I gave a tutorial on Large Language Models for African languages at SACAIR 2025.
- Dec 2024My student Natalie Alexander has been awarded a Google PhD Fellowship.