Saadia Gabriel, an assistant professor of computer science at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has received an Amazon Research Award to develop artificial intelligence and natural language processing models that better support African languages.
Gabriel received $250,000 in compute credits through Amazon’s Build on Trainium program, which supports AI research using high-performance chips developed by Amazon Web Services. She is one of 34 award recipients from 30 universities worldwide.
The award will support Gabriel and her doctoral student Sheriff Issaka in developing AI models that can understand and connect spoken and written African languages. Their recent work on the project received a Senior Area Chair Highlights Award at the Association for Computational Linguistics 2026 conference.
AI models depend heavily on the quantity and quality of training data, posing particular challenges for languages with comparatively limited speech and text data. To address this gap, the researchers will evaluate multimodal understanding and translation across languages representing five African linguistic groups: Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Khoisan and Khoe-Kwadi. The selection is intended to provide broad geographic and linguistic coverage.
