Abdou Aziz DIOP
| PhD Researcher — Speech-to-Speech Translation | NLP · ASR · African Languages |
I am a PhD student at Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar, Senegal, working on Speech-to-Speech Translation (S2ST) for low-resource and African languages. My research spans automatic speech recognition, neural machine translation, and speech synthesis, with a focus on building spoken-language technology that serves the hundreds of millions of speakers of African languages who are currently underserved by existing NLP systems.
Before my PhD I earned a degree in Mathematics & Computer Science and a Master’s in Mathematics (thesis: Rank-Based Cryptography — Encryption & Signature), then specialised in Data Transmission and Information Systems. I have since worked extensively on multilingual NLP, conversational AI, and data science.
Email: abdouaziz@gmail.com · GitHub: abdouaziz · LinkedIn: abdouaziiz · Twitter/X: @abdouaziiz
News
- Mar 2026 Started working on a unified end-to-end S2ST architecture for Wolof–French and Pulaar–French language pairs.
- Jan 2026 Released a new ASR dataset for Wolof containing 120h of transcribed speech. Available on HuggingFace.
- Sep 2025 Presented work on low-resource ASR at an African NLP workshop. Slides and recording available on GitHub.
- Jun 2025 Open-sourced a fine-tuned Whisper model for Wolof — first publicly available Wolof ASR checkpoint.
- 2023 Started PhD in Speech-to-Speech Translation.
Research Interests
- Speech-to-Speech Translation
- Automatic Speech Recognition
- Neural Machine Translation
- Text-to-Speech Synthesis
- Low-Resource NLP
- African Languages
- Multilingual Models
- Self-Supervised Learning for Speech
- Conversational AI
Publications & Preprints
African Lang.
African
Update paper links and co-authors as submissions are finalised.
Education
PhD — Speech-to-Speech Translation (in progress) Université Cheikh Anta Diop (UCAD), Dakar · 2023 – present
Postgraduate — Data Transmission & Information Systems Université Cheikh Anta Diop (UCAD), Dakar
Master’s — Mathematics (Rank-Based Cryptography — Encryption & Signature)
Bachelor’s — Mathematics & Computer Science
Selected Projects
- African ASR Toolkit — Whisper fine-tuning pipelines and pre-trained checkpoints for Wolof, Pulaar, and Mandinka.
- Low-Resource S2ST — Cascaded and direct S2ST systems benchmarked on African language pairs.
- NLP for Wolof — Tokenizers, language models, and evaluation datasets for Wolof.