CURRICULUM VITAE

Solomon Teferra Abate

Tel. (0049)(0)17624381573 e_Mail: abate@uni-bremen.de

I. FORMAL EDUCATION and WORK EXPERIENCE

1989 Secondary School at Nazareth Technical and Vocational School, Ethiopia
1989 – 1993 BSc in LIS at School of Information Studies for Africa, Addis Ababa University
1995 – 1997 Masters at School of Information Studies for Africa, Addis Ababa University
2002 – 2005 PhD research in automatic speech recognition at University of Hamburg.
I have developed an Amharic speech corpus that contains 20 hours of training speech.
2006 – 2007 Child care (as my wife has been working on her PhD studies)
2007 – 2009 A Guest researcher working on ASR at faculty of Informatics, University of Hamburg
Actively participating (in teaching and advising students) in the IT-PhD program at AAU
2010 – 2011 Post-Doctoral Researcher at LIG/GETALP, UJF, Grenoble, France.
Researched in the area of spoken language processing for under-resourced languages.
2012 – present Assistant Professor at Addis Ababa University, School of Information Sciences.
I was head of the school from June 2012 to end of May 2015.
2017 – Sep. 2018 Coordinator of the LT and IR tracks of the ITPhD Program at Addis Ababa University.
Sep. 2018 – Aug. 2019 Sabatical leave
April 2019 – Sep. 2020 Researcher at the Cognitive Systems Lab of the University of Bremen with the
Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt’s scholarship for experienced
researchers.
II. LANGUAGE
Language Speaking Listening Writing Reading
Amharic (First language) Excellent Excellent Excellent Excellent
English Excellent Excellent Excellent Excellent
German Good Good Fair Good
French Beginner Beginner Beginner Beginner

III. RESEARCH INTEREST

 Human Language Technology for Development (HLT4D), Multilingual Automatic Speech
Recognition (ASR), Acoustic and Language modeling, HMM and ANN based Natural Language and
Speech Processing, Machine Translation, Application of New Technologies Artificial Intelligent
Systems for Data (of different size) capturing, analytic, and use.

IV. COURSES THAUGHT

1. At Addis Ababa University for PhD programs
 Advanced Seminar in Language Technology I
 Advanced Seminar in Language Technology II
2. At Addis Ababa University for MSc programs
 Introduction to Natural Language and Speech Processing;
 Computational Linguistics (Morpho-Syntax);
 Information Storage and Retrieval
 Research Methods in Information Science and Systems;
 Foundations of Information Science and Systems;
  Introduction to Health Informatics
 Telemedicine
3. At University of Gonder for MSc programs
 Introduction to Natural Language and Speech Processing;
4. At Haromaya University for MSc programs
 Information Storage and Retrieval
5. At St Mary University for MSc programs
 Introduction to Natural Language and Speech Processing;
6. At Addis Ababa Science and Technology University for MSc programs
 Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems

V. ADVISING
PhD Theses:
 Extraction of Semantic Relations via a Distributional Approach
 Affix-Sequences-Based Machine Learning Methods For Morphological Analysis
MSc Theses (only few):
1. In the area of NLSP:
 Automatic Speech Recognition for Amharic Using Recurrent Neural Networks (ongoing)
 Prosody Based Automatic Amharic Speech Segmentation (ongoing)
 Normalization of Non Standard Words for Ethio-Semetic Speech Synthesis using Machine
learning Approach: A case of Amharic (ongoing)
 Development Of Stemmer For Kambaata Language Text
 Word Sense Disambiguation For Tigrigna Language Using Semi-Supervised Machine
Learning Approach
 Automatic Language Identification for Ethio-Semitic Languages Using Cumulative
Frequency Addition
 Syllable-Based Amharic Text-to-Speech (TTS) Synthesis System using HMM
 Unsupervised Part of speech Tagging For Amharic
 Brana (ብራና): Application Of Amharic Speech Rcognition Systemfor Dictation In Judicial
Domain
 Large Vocabulary Spontaneous Speech Recognition For Tigrigna
 Automatic Part-of -speech tagger for Tigrigna
 Afaan Oromoo Part of Speech Tagger Using Hybrid Model (Rule Based and Hidden Markov
Model Approaches)
 Development of an Amharic Speech to Ethiopian Sign Language Translation System
 Developing A Hybrid Hidden Markov Model/Artificial Neural Network Based Large
Vocabulary, Speaker Independent, Continuous Amharic Speech Recognition
 Design and Development of Automatic Unlexicalized Constituency Parser for Tigrigna
Language Using Supervised Machine Learning Approach with Automatic Probablistic
Context Free Grammar Induction
 Adding Part of Speech Tagged data to Semi-Supervised Word Sense Disambiguation
 Factoid Question Answering for Afaan Oromo
 A Named Entity Recognition for Amharic
 Amharic question Answering for list Questions: A case of Ethiopian Tourism
 A Named Entity Recognition for Amharic
 Development of Stemming algorithm for Agewi text : Longest match Approach
 2. In the area of Data Mining (DM) and Enterprise Systems:
 Current Status and Factors Affecting the Implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning at
Commercial Bank of Ethiopia
 Application of Data Mining for mobile fraud detection
 Application Of Data Mining Technology In Predicting And Associate Paterns Of Tourist
Preference Behavior
 Mining To Identify Telltale Patterns Of Child Labor Survey: A Case Of 2001 Child Labor
Survey In Ethiopia
3. In the area of Health Informatics (HI):
 Improving Data Quality and Information Use in the Out-Patient Department (OPD)
 Web-based appointment management system for the Outpatient Department of Armed Force
Referral and Teaching Hospital
 Assessment of the Knowledge & Information Source Preferences on MTCT of HIV among
HIV Positive Women in Addis Ababa
 Assessment and Improvement of Medical Laboratory Logistics Management Information
Systems in St. Paul Millennium Medical College

VI. PROJECTS
1. NetDiploma project (www.northumbria.ac.uk/netdiploma) - DPLAf (Digital Public Library
of Africa), funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
2. Cultural Heritage Inventory Management system(CHIMS) for ARCCH
3. System Analysis And Design Training for Oromoia integrated land management system
project office
4. ICT Business Sector Baseline Study funded with MCIT
5. Development of Ethiopian Languages Resources, Natural Language Applications and Speech
Processing Tools (Thematic research) funded with Addis Ababa University
6. Development of Morpheme-based Dictation System with the Support of an automatically
constructed Dictionary funded with MCIT
7. Towards the Development of Speech Recognition Application funded with MCIT
8. Design and Creation of Pronunciation Lexicon for Speech Processing in Under-resourced
and Morphologically Rich languages: The Case of Amharic Speech Processing funded with
Google Inc.
9. Automatic Construction of Amharic-English Electronic Subject Dictionary funded with MCIT
10.ICT Baseline Study in Ethiopia funded with MCIT

VII. WORKSHOP, SEMINARS PARTICIPATED

1. ICASSP 2020, Virtual Conference, With presentation
2. 10th International Conference on ICT for Development, Education & Training, Addis Ababa,
Ethiopia, May 20-22, 2015
3. The 12th International Conference on Green Innovation for African Renaissance, IEEE
Africon 2015. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Sep 14-17.
4. The International ACM Conference on Management of Emergent Digital EcoSystem
(MEDES’12). Addis Ababa, Ethiopia , Oct. 28-31, 2012.
5. AGIS 2011 - The Action Week for Global Information Sharing 2011 conference, Addis Ababa,
Ethiopia. Presented a paper.
6. HLTD 2011 - Conference on Human Language Technology for Development. Alexandria, Egypt 02-
05 May, 2011. Presented two papers.
7. SLTU 2010 - International Workshop on Spoken Languages Technologies for Under-resourced
languages. Penang, Malaysia. Presented a paper.
8. Interspeech 2007 - Eurospeech. Antwerp, Belgium. Presented a paper.
9. ACL2007 - 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Prague, Czech
Republic. Presented a paper.
10. Interspeech 2005 – Eurospeech. Lisbon, Portugal. Presented a paper.
11. Participated on EURON Summer School on Multimodal Human Robot Interaction at the faculty of
Informatik, University of Hamburg from 08 to 12 September 2003.
12. 15th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies. Hamburg, July 21-25, 2003. Presented a paper.
13.Participated on Summer University "Speech Recognition" at Faculty of Electrical Engineering and
Information Technology, Otto-Von-Guericke-University, Magdeburg from July 01, 2002 to August
30, 2002.

VIII. PUBLICATIONS
A) With peer review process
1. Solomon Teferra Abate, Martha Yifiru Tachbelie, Tanja Schultz. Deep Neural Networks Based
Automatic Speech Recognition for Four Ethiopian Languages. ICASSP 2020, pp. 8274-8278
2. Solomon Teferra Abate, Martha Yifiru Tachbelie, Michael Melese, Hafte Abera, Tewodros
Abebe, Wondwossen Mulugeta, Yaregal Assabie, Million Meshesha, Solomon Atnafu, Binyam
Ephrem Seyoum. Large Vocabulary Read Speech Corpora for Four Ethiopian Languages:
Amharic, Tigrigna, Oromo and Wolaytta. LREC 2020, pp. 4167-4171
3. Martha Yifiru Tachbelie, Ayimunishagu Abulimiti, Solomon Teferra Abate, Tanja Schultz.
DNN-Based Speech Recognition for Globalphone Languages. ICASSP 2020, pp. 8269-8273
4. Martha Yifiru Tachbelie, Solomon Teferra Abate, Tanja Schultz. Analysis of GlobalPhone and
Ethiopian Languages Speech Corpora for Multilingual ASR. LREC 2020, pp. 4152-4156
5. Martha Yifiru Tachbelie, Solomon Teferra Abate, Tanja Schultz. DNN-Based Multilingual
Automatic Speech Recognition for Wolaytta using Oromo Speech. SLTU/CCURL @ LREC
20202, pp. 265-270
6. Solomon Teferra Abate, Martha Yifiru Tachbelie, Tanja Schultz. Multilingual Acoustic and
Language Modeling for Ethio-Semitic Languages. Accepted for publication at INTERSPEECH
2020
7. Martha Yifiru Tachbelie, Solomon Teferra Abate, Tanja Schultz. Development of Multilingual
ASR Using GlobalPhone for Less-Resourced Languages: The Case of Ethiopian Languages.
Accepted for publication at INTERSPEECH 2020
8. Abate S.T. and others. (2018) Parallel Corpora for bi-Directional Statistical Machine Translation
for Seven Ethiopian Language Pairs. Accepted for Coling 2018
9. Abate S.T. and others. (2018) Parallel Corpora for bi-lingual English-Ethiopian Languages
Statistical Machine Translation. Accepted for Coling 2018
10. SUMAMO, J. S. and Abate S.T. (2018) Designing A Stemming Algorithm for Kambaata Text: A
Rule Based Approach. Accepted for International Journal of Computational Linguistics (IJCL)
Volume-9 Issue-1
11.Gemechu, D. T., Zock, M., Abate, S. T. (2016): Combining syntactic patterns and Wikipedia's
hierarchy of hyperlinks to extract meronym relations. Proceedings of the NAACL Student
Research Workshop
12.Mamo. G., Melucci M., Abate, S. T. (2016): Probabilistic and grouping methods for
morphological root identification for Afaan Oromo. 2016 6th International Conference - Cloud
System and Big Data Engineering (Confluence)
13.Mamo. G., Melucci M., Abate, S. T. (2015): Suffix sequences based morphological segmentation
for Afaan Oromo. IEEE. Africon
14. Tachbelie, M. Y. and Abate, S. T. (2015): Effect of Language Resources on Automatic Speech
 Recognition for Amharic. In Proceeding of IEEE Africon.
15. Abebe, E., Abate, S. T. and Tachbelie, M. Y. (2014): Development of an Amharic-English
Subject eDictionary. In Proceeding of the IST-Africa Conference.
16. Tachbelie, M. Y., Abate, S. T., Besacier, L. (2014): Using Different Acoustic, Lexical and
Language Modeling Units for ASR of an Under-Resourced Language – Amharic. In Speech
Communication 56, pp. 181-194.
17. Tachbelie, M. Y., Abate, S. T., Menzel, W. (2014): Using Morphemes in Language Modeling
and Automatic Speech Recognition of Amharic. In Journal of Natural Language Engineering,
Vol. 20, issue 2, pp. 235-259.
18. G Wassie, Ramesh B. P., Abate S. T., M Meshesha. (2014): A Word Sense Disambiguation
Model for Amharic Words using Semi-Supervised Learning Paradigm. Science, Technology and
Arts Research Journal. V 3(3).
19. Tachbelie, M. Y., Abate, S. T., Besacier, L. and Rossato, S. (2012): Syllable-based and Hybrid
Acoustic Models for Amharic Speech Recognition. With In proceeding of Workshop on Spoken
Language Technologies for Under-Resourced Languages, Cape Town, South Africa.
20.Gelas H., Abate S. T., Besacier L , Pellegrino F (2012): Analyse des performances de modèles de
langage sub-lexicale pour des langues peu-dotées à morphologie riche, JEP-TALN-RECITAL
21.Gelas H., Abate S. T., Besacier L , Pellegrino F. (2011): Quality Assessment of crowdsourcing
transcriptions for African languages. Interspeech 2011. Florence, Italy
22.Gelas H., Abate S. T., Besacier L , Pellegrino F (2011): Evaluation of crowdsourcing
transcriptions for African languages - HLTD 2011
23. Tachbelie, M. Y., Abate, S. T. and Besacier, L. (2011): Part-of-Speech Tagging for Under-
Resourced and Morphologically Rich Languages – The Case of Amharic. In Proceeding of HLTD
2011.
24. Tachbelie, M. Y., Abate, S. T. and Menzel, W. (2011): Morpheme-based and Factored Language
Modeling for Amharic Speech Recognition. In Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, post LTC-
2009 Publication, 2011.
25.Abate S. T., Besacier L and Seng S. (2010): Boosting N-gram Coverage for Unsegmented
Languages Using Multiple Text Segmentation Approach. WSSANLP - collocated with COLING
2010, Beijing, China
26. Tachbelie, M. Y., Menzel, W. and Abate, S. T. (2010): Morpheme-based Automatic Speech
Recognition for a Morphologically Rich Language – Amharic. In the proceedings of the 2 nd
workshop on spoken language technologies for under-resourced languages (SLTU 2010), Penang,
Malaysia.
27. Tachbelie, M. Y., Abate, S. T. and Menzel, W. (2009): Morpheme-based Language Modeling for
Amharic Speech Recognition. With Solomon Teferra Abate and Wolfgang Menzel. In the
proceedings of the 4th Language Technology Conference LTC-2009, Poznan, Poland.
28. Abate, S. T. and Menzel, W. (2007): Syllable-Based Speech Recognition for Amharic. ACL
2007
29. Abate, S. T. and Menzel, W. (2007): Automatic Speech Recognition for an Under-Resourced
Language - Amharic. INTERSPEECH 2007, Antwerp, Belgium
30. Abate, S. T. and Menzel, W. (2005): An Amharic Speech Corpus for Large Vocabulary
Continuous Speech Recognition. 9th Eurospeech Interspeech, Lisbon

B) Without peer review process

1. Abate, S. T., Tachbelie, M. Y. and Menzel, W. (2010): Amharic Speech Recognition: Past,
Present and Future. In Harald Aspen, BirhanuTeferra, Shiferaw Bekele and SveinEge, editors,
Research in Ethiopian Studies: Selected papers of the 16th International Conference of Ethiopian
Studies, HarrassowitzVerlag, Wiesbaden.
2. Abate, S. T., Tachbelie, M. Y. and Menzel, W. (2007): Amharic Speech Recognition: Past,
 Present and Future. With Solomon Teferra and Wolfgang Menzel. In Proceedings of the 16th.
International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, July 2007, Trondheim, Norway.
3. Beyene, B., and Abate, S. T. (2005). Access to information and communication technology
(ICT) and education for visual impaired people in Ethiopia. In S. Brüne & B. Tafla (Eds.), Auf dem
Weg zum modernen Äthiopien. Festschrift für Bairu Tafla (pp. 29–47). Münster: LIT-Verl.
4. Abate, S. T. and Menzel, W. and Tafla B. (2003): An Amharic Speech Corpus for Large
Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition. In Proceedings of the XVth International Conference of
Ethiopian Studies. Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden

IX. REFERENCES
Prof. Dr. Ing. Tanja Schultz, Cognitive Systems Lab, University of Bremen, Enrique-Schmidt-Str. 5,
28359 Bremen, Germany. Email: tanja.schultzuni-bremen.de

Dr. Tibebe Beshah, Head of the School of Information Science, College of Natural and Computational
Sciences, Addis Ababa University, Tel. +251 911242544, email: information_sci_cns@aau.edu.et

Prof. Dr. Ing. Wolfgang Menzel, Faculty of Informatics, University of Hamburg, Vögt-Koelln Str. 30, D-
22527 Hamburg, Germany. Tel. +49- 40- 428 83 2435.

Prof. Dr. Laurent Besacier, LIG/GETALP, UJF. Email: laurent.besacier@imag.fr