About

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I am a Lecturer (≈ US Assistant Professor) at the Computer Science Department of the University of Cape Town and part of the UCT NLP research group.

My current research is on low-resource NLP, data-efficient modelling, and linguistically informed interpretability. I am particularly interested in exploring the intersection of two areas where data efficiency is central: NLP for low-resource languages and developmentally plausible NLP.

I completed my PhD under Jan Buys at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. My thesis was on optimising subword segmentation for low-resource, morphologically complex languages. Previously I obtained a masters in AI at the University of Amsterdam, supervised by Martha Lewis, and my undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Mathematical Statistics at Stellenbosch University.

Recent Reviewing (2024/2025): ACL ARR, 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

October 2025

• Our paper The Learning Dynamics of Subword Segmentation for Morphologically Diverse Languages is accepted to AACL. I will be in Mumbai in December to present it.

• We released BabyBabelLM: A Multilingual Benchmark of Developmentally Plausible Training Data [website]. I was responsible for curating the datasets for five South African languages: isiXhosa, isiZulu, Sesotho, Sepedi, and Afrikaans.

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.

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.