Big news from San Diego: research from our lab picked up multiple international awards at the 2026 Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), one of the most competitive venues in NLP.
Afri-MCQA, our multimodal cultural question-answering benchmark covering 15 African languages, received both the Social Impact Paper Award and the SAC Highlight Award. POLAR, our benchmark for political polarisation across 22 languages, won Best Paper at the EEUCA workshop and was named Runner-Up for Best Task Organised at SemEval 2026.
Dr Idris Abdulmumin, co-author on both papers, also spoke at the BATCH 2026 “Beyond Alignment” session on what AI alignment looks like for low-resource languages, and Dr Abiodun Modupe represented DSFSI and the AI4D African Languages Lab throughout the conference.
We think these honours point to something bigger than any one paper: African-led research is increasingly shaping the benchmarks and questions that define multilingual AI, not just adapting what’s built elsewhere.
Read the full story, with photos from the ceremony: https://www.dsfsi.co.za/blog/dsfsi-research-earns-multiple-honours-at-acl-2026/
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