Research Fellow, Lancaster University

Dr Ignatius Ezeani is a Research Fellow at the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University. He is also a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Africa Research Institute Nairobi, Kenya. He has degrees in Computer Science, Advanced Software Engineering, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) and is interested in the application of NLP techniques in building resources for low-resource languages and domains, especially African languages.  

His current research interests focus on the efficient adaption of existing natural language processing tools and techniques to deal with the challenges of integrating the majority of the low-resource languages in a globalized world for task-oriented systems. He has contributed to building tools that support languages like Igbo and Welsh, and he is also working on other low-resource languages. 

Ignatius is currently the lead software developer on the £814k SBE-UKRI project trying to understand imprecise space and time in textual narratives through qualitative representations, reasoning, and visualization. He has worked on numerous recent projects, including the ongoing £80k FreeTxt project and led the creation of the Igbo-English MT benchmark dataset, a $23k Facebook-funded project. He is also part of Masakhane Initiative, the most vibrant African NLP research community where he is also leading a Google-backed Question Answering dataset creation project for Igbo.  

Over the past few years, Ignatius has co-authored several high-quality research papers in high-impact journals. One of his most impactful works to date is ‘Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languages’, which documents the journey as an organically developed community of Africans towards creating resources (novel datasets and benchmark models) to support effective machine translation for 30 African languages. This paper won the Wikimedia Foundation Research Award 2020.

“I am honoured to join the 2024 cohort of CoSeC Fellows!” says Ignatius. “I thank CoSeC for this wonderful opportunity to drive impactful innovations in scientific computing for collaborative research. My work aligns with the core objectives of CoSeC in building strong research communities of Computer Scientists for effective collaborations.”