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.
• Feb 2024I have been awarded a P rating by the National Research Foundation of South Africa.
• Oct 2023I have been promoted to Senior Lecturer at UCT (effective January 2024).
• Jul 2023I am spending my sabbatical from July to December 2023 at the HPI at the University of Potsdam, Germany, visiting Gerard de Melo's research group.
• Aug 2022I am attending the Deep Learning Indaba in Tunis.
• Feb 2022I attended the Hundzula Natural Language Processing and Linguistics Retreat at the University of Pretoria.
• Sep 2021I gave an invited talk at IndabaX Sudan.
• Feb 2021I gave a tutorial on Deep Learning of Natural Language Processing at SACAIR 2020.
• Jan 2021I have been awarded a Thuthuka grant from the South African National Research Foundation.