Junior Cedric TONGA

Hello, I’m Junior Cedric! 👋

I am a PhD student in Natural Language Processing (NLP) at MBZUAI 🇦🇪, supervised by Dr. Fajri Koto. My research focuses on a central question:

How can we make language models accessible to everyone while ensuring high performance?

To answer this, I explore ways to improve the multilingual capabilities of language models, with a particular interest in:

• Cultural alignment:
  How is cultural knowledge encoded in language models, and how can we adapt these representations to achieve better cultural awareness?

• Evaluation of language models:
  What are effective ways to assess cultural awareness in LMs? Can we develop standardized benchmarks and metrics to evaluate cultural representation, sensitivity, and other capabilities?

• Cross-lingual generalization and transfer:
  Can language models achieve strong reasoning performance in low-resource languages, comparable to English? How can we better transfer such capabilities across languages?

Beyond these core directions, I am also interested in the applications of NLP in education and finance.

Before starting my PhD, I worked as a Research Associate at MBZUAI, under the supervision of Dr. Fajri Koto, focusing on the cultural adaptation of large language models. I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science (First-Class Honours) from Tunisia 🇹🇳 and a Master’s of Science in Mathematics, Vision & Learning (MVA) from ENS Paris-Saclay (First-Class Honours) 🇫🇷. During my master’s studies, I also completed several research internships in NLP and machine learning.

If you’re interested in collaborating or simply discussing research in NLP, feel free to reach out via email. I’d be delighted to connect!