Ifeoma Okoh

Tobi Olatunji, Charles Nimo, Abraham Owodunni et al. · mila

Recent advancements in large language model(LLM) performance on medical multiple choice question (MCQ) benchmarks have stimulated interest from healthcare providers and patients globally. Particularly in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) facing acute physician shortages and lack of specialists, LLMs offer a potentially scalable pathway to enhance healthcare access and reduce costs. However, their effectiveness in the Global South, especially across the African continent, remains to be established. In this work, we introduce AfriMed-QA, the first large scale Pan-African English multi-specialty medical Question-Answering (QA) dataset, 15,000 questions (open and closed-ended) sourced from over 60 medical schools across 16 countries, covering 32 medical specialties. We further evaluate 30 LLMs across multiple axes including correctness and demographic bias. Our findings show significant performance variation across specialties and geographies, MCQ performance clearly lags USMLE (MedQA). We find that biomedical LLMs underperform general models and smaller edge-friendly LLMs struggle to achieve a passing score. Interestingly, human evaluations show a consistent consumer preference for LLM answers and explanations when compared with clinician answers.

Chris Chinenye Emezue, Ifeoma Okoh, Chinedu Mbonu et al.

The Igbo language is facing a risk of becoming endangered, as indicated by a 2025 UNESCO study. This highlights the need to develop language technologies for Igbo to foster communication, learning and preservation. To create robust, impactful, and widely adopted language technologies for Igbo, it is essential to incorporate the multi-dialectal nature of the language. The primary obstacle in achieving dialectal-aware language technologies is the lack of comprehensive dialectal datasets. In response, we present the IgboAPI dataset, a multi-dialectal Igbo-English dictionary dataset, developed with the aim of enhancing the representation of Igbo dialects. Furthermore, we illustrate the practicality of the IgboAPI dataset through two distinct studies: one focusing on Igbo semantic lexicon and the other on machine translation. In the semantic lexicon project, we successfully establish an initial Igbo semantic lexicon for the Igbo semantic tagger, while in the machine translation study, we demonstrate that by finetuning existing machine translation systems using the IgboAPI dataset, we significantly improve their ability to handle dialectal variations in sentences.

Wuraola Fisayo Oyewusi, Olubayo Adekanmbi, Ifeoma Okoh et al.

Most of the common applications of Named Entity Recognition (NER) is on English and other highly available languages. In this work, we present our findings on Named Entity Recognition for 5 Nigerian Languages (Nigerian English, Nigerian Pidgin English, Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa). These languages are considered low-resourced, and very little openly available Natural Language Processing work has been done in most of them. In this work, individual NER models were trained and metrics recorded for each of the languages. We also worked on a combined model that can handle Named Entity Recognition (NER) for any of the five languages. The combined model works well for Named Entity Recognition(NER) on each of the languages and with better performance compared to individual NER models trained specifically on annotated data for the specific language. The aim of this work is to share our learning on how information extraction using Named Entity Recognition can be optimized for the listed Nigerian Languages for inclusion, ease of deployment in production and reusability of models. Models developed during this project are available on GitHub https://git.io/JY0kk and an interactive web app https://nigner.herokuapp.com/.