Claytone Sikasote

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skscla001@myuct.ac.za

Hello! I’m a PhD student in Computer Science at the Hasso-Plattner Institute (HPI) Research School at University of Cape Town (UCT) in Cape Town, South Africa, supervised by Dr. Jan Buys and Prof. Hussein Suleman.

Previously, I was a Masters student at Africa Institute of Mathematical Sciences for the prestigious Google and Meta sponsored African Masters in Machine Intelligence programme, where I obtained Master of Science degree in Mathematical Sciences (specialisation: Machine Intelligence), and had the privilege to be supervised by Prof. Antonios Anastasopoulos for my final research work, and with whom I still collaborate with. Before that, I obtained Master of Science in Information Technology Management from Binary University College of Management and Entrepreneurship in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Prior to that, I obtained my Bachelor of Computer Science degree from University of Zambia in Lusaka, Zambia.

I’m also a Research Fellow at University of Zambia(UNZA) where I have served as a lecturer of Computer Science courses in the Department of Computer Science to postgraduate diploma and undergraduate level student classes.

My primary area of interest is speech and language processing, particularly, in low-resource and multilingual setting. Concretely, I’m interested in building data-efficient and robust speech recognition and translation models for low-resource languages. I’m also interested in exploring various creative, cost-effective and responsible approaches to creating high-quality NLP data resources for under-resourced languages.

news

May 11, 2024 I had the privilege to give a talk on ‘Building multimodal datasets for African languages’ at the AfricaNLP 2024 workshop that was co-located with ICLR 2024 conference. See slides!
Jan 01, 2024 We, Antonios and I, are co-organising a Low-resource shared task at IWSLT 2024 for the language pair: IciBemba - English. Please consider participating!
Nov 30, 2023 Recieved the Hasso-Plattner Institute (HPI) scholarship to pursue PhD in Computer Science at University of Cape Town (UCT) in Cape Town, South Africa. :sparkles:
Aug 23, 2023 Presented our Zambezi Voice paper at INTERSPEECH 2023 in Dublin, Ireland.
Jun 12, 2023 Presented our Lacuna Fund supported work, BIG-C: a Multimodal Multi-Purpose Dataset for Bemba at the AfricAI 2023 conference in Kigali, Rwanda!

selected publications

  1. ACL
    BIG-C: a Multimodal Multi-Purpose Dataset for Bemba
    Claytone Sikasote, Eunice Mukonde , Md Mahfuz Ibn Alam , and 1 more author
    In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) , 2023
  2. Interspeech
    Zambezi Voice: A Multilingual Speech Corpus for Zambian Languages
    Claytone Sikasote, Kalinda Siaminwe , Stanly Mwape , and 6 more authors
    In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH , 2023
  3. LREC
    BembaSpeech: A Speech Recognition Corpus for the Bemba Language
    Claytone Sikasote, and Antonios Anastasopoulos
    In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference , 2022