About

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I am a Lecturer (≈ US Assistant Professor) at the Computer Science Department of the University of Cape Town and a researcher in UCT NLP. I recently finished my PhD under Jan Buys. My project was on subword-optimised neural text generation (language modelling, MT, data-to-text) for low-resource, morphologically complex languages.

My broader research interests are in low-resource NLP, data-efficient modelling, and linguistically informed interpretability.

Previously I completed my masters in AI at the University of Amsterdam, supervised by Martha Lewis. Before that I obtained my undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Mathematical Statistics at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.

Reviewing (2022-2025): ACL ARR, EMNLP, EACL, ICLR, NeurIPS, COLM, BlackBoxNLP, AfricaNLP

Teaching (2025): CSC3022F Machine Learning for 3rd years, CSC2042S Supervised Machine Learning for 2nd years, CSC1016S Java programming for 1st years, CSC4019Z Research Methods for Honours.

News

May 2025 My students and collaborators are presenting a few workhops papers at NAACL and ACL.

• Designing and Contextualising Probes for African Languages
  Wisdom Aduah, Francois Meyer
  AfricaNLP workshop @ ACL 2025

• Neural Morphological Tagging for Nguni Languages
  Cael Marquard, Simbarashe Mawere, Francois Meyer
  AfricaNLP workshop @ ACL 2025

• Benchmarking IsiXhosa Automatic Speech Recognition and Machine Translation for Digital Health Provision
  Abby Blocker, Francois Meyer, Ahmed Biyabani, Joyce Mwangama, Mohammed Ishaaq Datay, Bessie Malila
  Workshop on Patient-Oriented Language Processing (CL4Health) @ NAACL 2025

December 2024 Our paper BabyLMs for isiXhosa: Data-Efficient Language Modelling in a Low-Resource Context is accepted to the Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages (LoResLM) at COLING 2025.

October 2024 I submitted my PhD thesis!

June 2024 I attended NAACL in Mexico City to present our paper A Systematic Analysis of Subwords and Cross-Lingual Transfer in Multilingual Translation.

May 2024 I attended LREC-COLING in Turin to present a talk on T2X and a poster on NGLUEni.

• T2X: Addressing the Challenges of Low-Resource Agglutinative Data-to-Text Generation
  Francois Meyer and Jan Buys
  [dataset]

• NGLUEni: Benchmarking and Adapting Pretrained Language Models for Nguni Languages
  Francois Meyer, Haiyue Song, Abhisek Chakrabarty, Jan Buys, Raj Dabre and Hideki Tanaka
  [benchmark]

May 2024 Our paper NGLUEni: Benchmarking and Adapting Pretrained Language Models for Nguni Languages won a best paper award at the AfricaNLP workshop co-located with ICLR 2024.

December 2023 I was awarded an Amazon travel scholarship to present a poster about our work on Morphological Compositional Generalisation at the GenBench workshop @ EMNLP in Singapore.

August 2023 I gave an invited talk at the NLP for Southern African Languages Workshop collocated with COMPASS 2023.

May - August 2023 I spent 3 months in Kyoto, Japan for a research internship at the NICT Advanced Translation Technology Laboratory.

May 2023 Our paper Subword Segmental Machine Translation: Unifying Segmentation and Target Sentence Generation has been accepted at Findings of ACL.

October 2022 Our paper Subword Segmental Language Modelling for Nguni Languages has been accepted at Findings of EMNLP.

September 2022 Our submission to the WMT22 Shared Task: Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for African Languages is a multilingual translation model for 8 South African languages.

December 2021 I attended SACAIR 2021 to present my winning submission to the Nguni languages POS tagging shared task.