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Ignatius Ezeani

Research

  • Computing and Communications
  • SCC (Data Science)
  • UCREL - University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language
Type of address: Postal address.
InfoLab21
LA1 4WA
Lancaster

Email: i.ezeani@lancaster.ac.uk

Employment

Senior Research Associate

Research

Computing and Communications

Lancaster University

Lancaster, United Kingdom

15/04/2022 → present

SCC (Data Science)

Lancaster University

1/10/2018 → present

UCREL - University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language

Lancaster University

United Kingdom

1/10/2018 → present

Senior Teaching Associate

Computing and Communications

Lancaster University

Lancaster, United Kingdom

2/03/202014/04/2022

Research Associate

Research

Computing and Communications

Lancaster University

Lancaster, United Kingdom

1/12/20181/03/2020

Research Associate

Research

Computing and Communications

Lancaster University

Lancaster, United Kingdom

1/10/201830/11/2018

Research outputs

Towards an Extensible Framework for Understanding Spatial Narratives

Ezeani, I., Rayson, P., Gregory, I., Haris, E., Cohn, A., Stell, J., Cole, T., Taylor, J., Bodenhamer, D., Devadasan, N., Steiner, E., Frank, Z. & Olson, J., 13/11/2023, GeoHumanities '23: Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Humanities. New York: ACM, p. 1-10 10 p. (Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Humanities).

Spatio-Textual Regions: Extracting Sense of Place from Spatial Narratives

Steiner, E., Frank, Z., Gregory, I., Bodenhamer, D. & Ezeani, I., 26/08/2023, PLATIAL’23: International Symposium on Platial Information Science 19–21 September 2023 / Dortmund, Germany. p. 15-22 8 p.

Analysing and visualising free-text comments: a corpus-based toolkit

Knight, D., Rayson, P., Khallaf, N., Morris, S., El-Haj, M. & Ezeani, I., 5/07/2023.

AfriQA: Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering for African Languages

Ogundepo, O., Gwadabe, T. R., Rivera, C. E., Clark, J. H., Ruder, S., Adelani, D. I., Ezeani, I., Chukwuneke, C., Dossou, B. F. P., Abdou, A. DIOP., Sikasote, C., Hacheme, G., Buzaaba, H., Mabuya, R., Osei, S., Emezue, C., Kahira, A. N., Muhammad, S. H., Oladipo, A., Owodunni, A. T., & 32 othersTonja, A. L., Shode, I., Asai, A., Ajayi, T. O., Siro, C., Arthur, S., Adeyemi, M., Ahia, O., Anuoluwapo, A., Awosan, O., Opoku, B., Ayodele, A., Otiende, V., Mwase, C., Sinkala, B., Rubungo, A. N., Ajisafe, D. A., Onwuegbuzia, E. F., Mbow, H., Niyomutabazi, E., Mukonde, E., Lawan, F. I., Ahmad, I. S., Alabi, J. O., Namukombo, M., Chinedu, M., Phiri, M., Putini, N., Mngoma, N., Amuok, P. A., Iro, R. N. & Adhiambo, S., 11/05/2023, Arxiv.

Extracting Imprecise Geographical and Temporal References from Journey Narratives

Ezeani, I., Rayson, P. & Gregory, I., 2/04/2023, Text2Story 2023 Sixth Workshop on Narrative Extraction From Texts: Proceedings of Text2Story — Sixth Workshop on Narrative Extraction From Texts held in conjunction with the 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2023). CEUR Workshop Proceedings, p. 113-118 5 p. 11. (CEUR Workshop Proceedings; vol. 3370).

IgboNER 2.0: Expanding Named Entity Recognition Datasets via Projection

Chukwuneke, CI., Rayson, P., Ezeani, I., El-Haj, M., Asogwa, D., Okpalla, C. & Mbonu, C., 3/03/2023, (Accepted/In press).

MasakhaNER 2.0: Africa-centric Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognition

Adelani, D. I., Neubig, G., Ruder, S., Rijhwani, S., Beukman, M., Palen-Michel, C., Lignos, C., Alabi, J. O., Muhammad, S. H., Nabende, P., Dione, C. M. B., Bukula, A., Mabuya, R., Dossou, B. F. P., Sibanda, B., Buzaaba, H., Mukiibi, J., Kalipe, G., Mbaye, D., Taylor, A., & 25 othersKabore, F. O., Emezue, C. C., Anuoluwapo, A., Ogayo, P., Gitau, C., Munkoh-Buabeng, E., Koagne, V. M., Tapo, A. A., Macucwa, T., Marivate, V., Mboning, E., Gwadabe, T., Adewumi, T. P., Ahia, O., Nakatumba-Nabende, J., Mokono, N. L., Ezeani, I., Chukwuneke, C., Adeyemi, M., Hacheme, G., Abdulmumin, I., Ogundepo, O., Yousuf, O., Ngoli, T. M. & Klakow, D., 15/11/2022, In: arXiv. abs/2210.12391, 22 p.

IgboBERT Models: Building and Training Transformer Models for the Igbo Language

Chukwuneke, CI., Rayson, P., Ezeani, I. & El-Haj, M., 20/06/2022, LREC 2022 Conference Proceedings. Calzolari, N. (ed.). Paris: European Language Resources Association (ELRA), p. 5114–5122 9 p.

Introducing the Welsh Text Summarisation Dataset and Baseline Systems

Ezeani, I., El-Haj, M., Morris, J. & Knight, D., 20/06/2022, LREC 2022 Conference Proceedings. Calzolari, N. (ed.). Paris: European Languages Resources Association, p. 5097-5106 10 p.

Creation of an Evaluation Corpus and Baseline Evaluation Scores for Welsh Text Summarisation

El-Haj, M., Ezeani, I., Morris, J. & Knight, D., 15/06/2022, p. 14-21. 8 p.

MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African Languages

Masakhane, 1/10/2021, In: Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 9, p. 1116-1131 16 p.

Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languages

Nekoto, W., Marivate, V., Matsila, T., Fasubaa, T., Kolawole, T., Fagbohungbe, T., Akinola, S. O., Muhammad, S. H., Kabongo, S., Osei, S., Freshia, S., Niyongabo, R. A., Macharm, R., Ogayo, P., Ahia, O., Meressa, M., Adeyemi, M., Mokgesi-Selinga, M., Okegbemi, L., Martinus, L. J., & 28 othersTajudeen, K., Degila, K., Ogueji, K., Siminyu, K., Kreutzer, J., Webster, J., Ali, J. T., Abbott, J., Orife, I., Ezeani, I., Dangana, I. A., Kamper, H., Elsahar, H., Duru, G., Kioko, G., Murhabazi, E., Biljon, E. V., Whitenack, D., Onyefuluchi, C., Emezue, C., Dossou, B., Sibanda, B., Bassey, B. I., Olabiyi, A., Ramkilowan, A., Öktem, A., Akinfaderin, A. & Bashir, A., 5/10/2020, In: arXiv.

Infrastructure for Semantic Annotation in the Genomics Domain

El-Haj, M., Rutherford, N., Coole, M., Ezeani, I., Prentice, S., Ide, N., Knight, J., Piao, S., Mariani, J., Rayson, P. & Suderman, K., 11/05/2020, LREC 2020, Twelfth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation: LREC'20. Paris: European Language Resources Association (ELRA), p. 6921-6929 9 p.

Igbo-English Machine Translation: An Evaluation Benchmark

Ezeani, I., Rayson, P., Onyenwe, I. E., Chinedu, U. & Hepple, M., 1/04/2020. 4 p.

Igbo-English Machine Translation: An Evaluation Benchmark

Ezeani, I., Rayson, P., Onyenwe, I., Uchechukwu, C. & Hepple, M., 1/04/2020, In: arXiv. 4 p.

Corpus-based approaches to Igbo diacritic restoration

Ezeani, I., 30/09/2019, University of Sheffield. 270 p.

Toward an effective Igbo part-of-speech tagger

Onyenwe, I. E., Hepple, M., Chinedu, U. & Ezeani, I., 31/08/2019, In: ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing (TALLIP). 18, 4, 26 p., 42.

Leveraging Pre-Trained Embeddings for Welsh Taggers

Ezeani, I., Piao, S., Neale, S., Rayson, P. & Knight, D., 2/08/2019, Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP-2019): Held at the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Florence, Italy: Association for Computational Linguistics, p. 270-280 11 p.

Open Welsh Language Resources for a Corpus Annotation Framework

Piao, S. S., Neale, S., Ezeani, I., Rayson, P. E., Knight, D. & Donnelly, K., 26/07/2019.

Bootstrapping Method for Developing Part-of-Speech Tagged Corpus in Low Resource Languages Tagset - A Focus on an African Igbo.

Onyenwe, I. E., Onyedinma, E. G., Aniegwu, G. E. & Ezeani, I. M., 2019, In: CoRR. abs/1903.05225

Multi-task projected embedding for igbo

Ezeani, I., Hepple, M., Onyenwe, I. & Enemuo, C., 8/09/2018, Text, Speech, and Dialogue - 21st International Conference, TSD 2018, Proceedings. Sojka, P., Horák, A., Kopecek, I. & Pala, K. (eds.). Cham: Springer-Verlag, p. 285-294 10 p. (Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics); vol. 11107 LNAI).

Transferred Embeddings for Igbo Similarity, Analogy, and Diacritic Restoration Tasks.

Ezeani, I., Onyenwe, I. E. & Hepple, M., 08/2018, COLING 2018 - 3rd Workshop on Semantic Deep Learning, SemDeep 2018 - Proceedings. p. 30-38 9 p. (COLING 2018 - 3rd Workshop on Semantic Deep Learning, SemDeep 2018 - Proceedings).

Igbo Diacritic Restoration using Embedding Models.

Ezeani, I., Hepple, M., Onyenwe, I. E. & Chioma, E., 06/2018, NAACL-HLT (Student Research Workshop). p. 54-60 7 p.

A basic language resource kit implementation for the IgboNLP project

Onyenwe, I. E., Hepple, M., Chinedu, U. & Ezeani, I., 31/01/2018, In: ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing (TALLIP). 17, 2, 23 p., 10.

Automatic Restoration of Diacritics for Igbo Language

Ezeani, I., Hepple, M., Onyenwe, I., Sojka, P. (ed.), Horák, A. (ed.), Kopeček, I. (ed.) & Pala, K. (ed.), 1/01/2016, International Conference on Text, Speech, and Dialogue: TSD 2016: Text, Speech, and Dialogue. Springer, p. 198-205 8 p.

Digital library deployment in a university: Challenges and prospects

Anunobi, C. V. & Ezeani, M. I., 14/06/2011, In: Library Hi Tech. 29, 2, p. 373-386 14 p.

Activities

Spatial Humanities: Finding spatial and time narratives in corpus data

Ignatius Ezeani (Organiser), Ian Gregory (Organiser) & Paul Rayson (Organiser)

2023 → …

BlackinAI Meet-Up at ICLR2020

Ignatius Ezeani (Organiser)

29/04/2020

International Conference on Representation Learning 2020

Ignatius Ezeani (Speaker)

26/04/2020

3rd Black-in-AI Workshop @ NeurIPS2019

Ignatius Ezeani (Organiser), Charles Onu (Organiser), Flora Tasse (Organiser), Ezinne Nwankwo (Organiser), Esube Bekele (Organiser), Daniel Nkemelu (Organiser), Victor Silva (Organiser) & Bernease Herman (Organiser)

8/12/201914/12/2019

Using CorCenCC: Corpws Cenedlaethol Cymraeg Cyfoes – National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh

Dawn Knight (Organiser), Steve Morris (Organiser), Tess Fitzpatrick (Organiser), Paul Rayson (Organiser), Ignatius Ezeani (Organiser) & Scott Piao (Organiser)

2019

Data Science Africa Summer School, Abuja, Nigeria

Ignatius Ezeani (Speaker)

16/11/2018

Press/Media

AI in Africa: Teaching a bot to read my mum's texts

Dr Ignatius Ezeani

30/04/20

1 item of Media coverage

BBC World Service - Africa Daily

Dr Ignatius Ezeani

3/08/22

1 Media contribution

Projects

AfriLowResNLP: The Igbo-English Machine Translation Project

Ezeani, I., Rayson, P., Onyenwe, I. E. & Chinedu, U.

3/02/2029/01/21

ACC: Welsh Summary Creator

El-Haj, M., Knight, D., Morris, J. & Ezeani, I.

1/05/211/05/22

Datasets

CorCenCC: Corpws Cenedlaethol Cymraeg Cyfoes – the National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh

Knight, D. (Creator), Morris, S. (Creator), Fitzpatrick, T. (Creator), Rayson, P. (Creator), Spasić, I. (Creator), Thomas, E. M. (Creator), Lovell, A. (Creator), Morris, J. (Creator), Evas, J. (Creator), Stonelake, M. (Creator), Arman, L. (Creator), Davies, J. (Creator), Ezeani, I. (Creator), Neale, S. (Creator), Needs, J. (Creator), Piao, S. (Creator), Rees, M. (Creator), Watkins, G. (Creator), Williams, L. (Creator), Muralidaran, V. (Creator), Tovey-Walsh, B. (Creator), Anthony, L. (Creator), Cobb, T. M. (Creator), Deuchar, M. (Creator), Donnelly, K. (Creator), McCarthy, M. (Creator) & Scannell, K. (Creator), Cardiff University, 2020

Igbo-English Machine Translation: An Evaluation Benchmark

Ezeani, I. (Creator), Onyenwe, I. E. (Creator), Chinedu, U. (Creator), Rayson, P. (Creator) & Hepple, M. (Creator), Github, 1/04/2020