Publications

Conference Papers

• A Systematic Analysis of Subwords and Cross-Lingual Transfer in Multilingual Translation
  Francois Meyer and Jan Buys
  NAACL Findings 2024

• Triples-to-isiXhosa (T2X): Addressing the Challenges of Low-Resource Agglutinative
  Data-to-Text Generation
  Francois Meyer and Jan Buys
  LREC-COLING 2024 [data]

• NGLUEni: Benchmarking and Adapting Pretrained Language Models for Nguni Languages
  Francois Meyer, Haiyue Song, Abhisek Chakrabarty, Jan Buys, Raj Dabre and Hideki Tanaka
  LREC-COLING 2024 [data]

• SubMerge: Merging Equivalent Subword Tokenizations for Subword Regularized Models in Neural Machine Translation
  Haiyue Song, Francois Meyer, Raj Dabre, Hideki Tanaka, Chenhui Chu, Sadao Kurohashi
  EAMT 2024

• Subword Segmental Machine Translation: Unifying Segmentation and Target Sentence Generation
  Francois Meyer and Jan Buys
  Findings of ACL 2023

• Subword Segmental Language Modelling for Nguni Languages
  Francois Meyer and Jan Buys
  Findings of EMNLP 2022

• NLAPOST2021 1st Shared Task on Part-of-Speech Tagging for Nguni Languages
  Franziska Pannach, Francois Meyer, Edgar Jembere, Dlamini, Sibonelo Zamokuhle
  Proceedings of the International Conference of the Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa (DHASA) 2021

• Challenging Distributional Models with a Conceptual Network of Philosophical Terms
  Yvette Oortwijn, Jelke Bloem, Pia Sommerauer, Francois Meyer, Wei Zhou, and Antske Fokkens
  NAACL 2021

• Modelling Lexical Ambiguity with Density Matrices
  Francois Meyer and Martha Lewis
  CoNLL 2020

• Learning Concept Embeddings from Temporal Data
  Francois Meyer, Brink van der Merwe, and Dirko Coetsee
  Journal of Universal Computer Science, 2018

Workshop Papers

• 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

• BabyLMs for isiXhosa: Data-Efficient Language Modelling in a Low-Resource Context
  Alexis Matzopoulos, Charl Hendriks, Hishaam Mahomed and Francois Meyer
  Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages @ COLING 2025

• University of Cape Town’s WMT22 System: Multilingual Machine Translation for
  Southern African Languages
  Khalid N. Elmadani, Francois Meyer, and Jan Buys
  WMT 2022

• The semantics of meaning: distributional approaches for studying philosophical text
  Francois Meyer, Yvette Oortwijn, Pia Sommerauer, Jelke Bloem, Arianna Betti, and Antske Fokkens Proceedings of the Network Institute Academy Assistants programme, 2019

Theses

• PhD thesis: Subword Segmental Neural Language Generation for Nguni Languages
  University of Cape Town, 2024
  Supervisor: Jan Buys

• MSc thesis: Lexical ambiguity with density matrices
  University of Amsterdam, 2020
  Supervisor: Martha Lewis

• BSc Honours thesis: Learning Concept Embeddings from Temporal Data
  University of Stellenbosch, 2017
  Supervisor: Brink van der Merwe