Zola Mahlaza, PhD

Computer Scientist.

My current research is in natural language generation for African languages. I am also interested in conceptual modelling, knowledge engineering, and human language technologies.

Recent highlights:

• We created algorithms for verbalising numbers in isiZulu + created a novel dataset. Work was presented @ the 17th INLG
• We replicated Gabriel et al.’s work as part of HumEval @ LREC-COLING 2024
• Our paper on automatically extracting phonological conditioning rules was presented at DHASA2023
• We presented our paper, part of the ‘Enterprise Medical Imaging in Zambia’ project, at MTSR2023
• We received a distinguished paper award at FOIS 2023

Service:

• 2024: The 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation
• 2023: ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, IEEE Transactions on Education , South African Computer Journal, Local chair @ Compass 2023, The 22nd International Semantic Web Conference, 16th International Natural Language Generation Conference
• 2022: The 21st International Semantic Web Conference, ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, The 13th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Southern African Artificial Intelligence Conference: Artificial Intelligence for Science, Technology and Society, Applied ontology

My Dijkstra number is 5