Zola Mahlaza

I am a lecturer at the department of Informatics, University of Pretoria.

I did my PhD at the Computer Science department, UCT with Assoc.Prof. Keet’s KnowledgE ENgineering (KEEN) team. My current research focus is on natural language generation for Nguni languages. I am interested in conceptual modelling and human language technologies.

Recent highlights:

• Published a journal article (ACM TALLIP) on an architecture for surface realisers created for low-resourced langs
• Contributed to running a tutorial on ontology verbalisation at JOWO2022
• Presented a long paper on creating an automated assistant for high school maths education at SACLA2022
• The ToCT task ontology for capturing complex templates was published at JOWO 2021
• We investigated the association between various types of NLG errors and low human judgements of naturalness and quality for machine learning vs. template generated texts

Reviewing:

• 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
• 2021: Progress in Artificial Intelligence, 14th International Conference on Natural Language Generation, Southern African Artificial Intelligence Conference: Artificial Intelligence for Science, Technology and Society

My Dijkstra number is 5