Welcome!
I am Lateef Adeleke, a PhD candidate in Linguistics at the University of Rochester.
I work at the intersection of field linguistics, grammatical description, and Natural Language Processing.
📄 CV (PDF)
🏛️ Google Scholar ·
🐙 GitHub
✉️ ladeleke@ur.rochester.edu
Research
My work focuses on African languages, and I combine fieldwork, formal grammatical analysis, and neural modeling to build computational systems grounded in real linguistic structure.
I am currently leading a multi-year ELDP-sponsored documentation project on Uneme, an underdescribed Nigerian language. I am developing a multimodal corpora, annotation, grammatical description, and an Uneme-English bilingual dictionary. I am also working on the influence of genealogical relatedness, phonological similarity, tone systems, and domain variation on cross-lingual transfer in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR).
Research Approach
My work integrates:
- Field linguistics and corpus creation (ELAR archiving)
- Formal morphosyntactic analysis (tense-aspect-polarity systems, negation asymmetries, Distributed Morphology)
- ASR experimentation (Whisper, Wav2Vec 2.0, MMS)
- Tone-aware and feature-injection methods for improving performance on low-resource and endangered languages
Broader Vision
African languages should not remain underdescribed or passive “low-resource benchmarks”. They should actively participate in the theory of language and design of next-generation language technologies.
News
- 2026 — At the 55th CALL in Leiden, I will give a talk on the “Reflexes of Movement in Uneme”
- 2026 — At the NbN 2026 in Frankfurt, I will give a talk on the “Sources of TAM Neutralization in Edoid”
- 2026 — At ACAL57 in Buffalo, I will give a talk on “Polarity-Conditioned asymmetries in Uneme”
- 2026 — At ACAL57 in Buffalo, I will give a talk on a co-authored paper tittled the “Reflexes of Movement in Uhami”
- 2026 — Attending the 7th AfricaNLP in Rabat, Morocco!
- 2026 — Began the second round of data collection for documenting Uneme
- Sept 2025 — Presented at the University of Rochester’s Omnibus Meeting.
- June 2025 — Began data collection for Uneme documentation.
- June 2025 — Organized training on documentation methods in Nigeria.
- June 2025 — Awarded the Donald M. and Janet C. Barnard Fellowship
- May 2025 — Attended ELDP’s Language Documentation Training in Berlin.
- May 2025 — Presented at the 56th ACAL, University of Minnesota.
- April 2025 — Awarded the ELDP’s Individual Graduate Scholarship to Document Uneme Iron Technology.
Current Projects
- Creating an annotated speech corpus for Uneme
- Building a multimedia FLEx Dictionary for Uneme
Field
