UCLA Computer Scientist Saadia Gabriel Receives Amazon Research Award to Advance AI for African Languages
Gabriel received $250,000 in compute credits through Amazon’s Build on Trainium program, which supports AI research using high-performance chips developed by Amazon Web Services. She is one of 34 award recipients from 30 universities worldwide.
The award will support Gabriel and her doctoral student Sheriff Issaka in developing AI models that can understand and connect spoken and written African languages. Their recent work on the project received a Senior Area Chair Highlights Award at the Association for Computational Linguistics 2026 conference.
AI models depend heavily on the quantity and quality of training data, posing particular challenges for languages with comparatively limited speech and text data. To address this gap, the researchers will evaluate multimodal understanding and translation across languages representing five African linguistic groups: Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Khoisan and Khoe-Kwadi. The selection is intended to provide broad geographic and linguistic coverage.
“African languages comprise nearly one-third of the world’s languages and are spoken by about 1.5 billion people, yet they remain underrepresented in the data used to train today’s AI systems,” Gabriel said. “We want to change that by building the datasets and models needed to make AI systems work better for a much broader range of languages and the people who speak them.”
The researchers have also begun a five-year effort working with native speakers to expand a dataset spanning 40 African languages, with a goal of collecting more than 15,000 hours of validated speech data and 50 billion tokens of text. The data will be used to train the team’s models for both speech and text applications.
At UCLA Samueli, Gabriel directs the Misinformation, AI and Responsible Society Lab. She is also a co-director of the Natural Language Processing Group at UCLA and an affiliate faculty member with the UCLA Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies.
The Build on Trainium program has also funded 14 Amazon Trainium Fellows at UCLA Samueli, in addition to 28 engineering doctoral students who received Amazon fellowships for the 2026 winter quarter. The fellowships are coordinated through the Science Hub for Humanity and Artificial Intelligence, a collaboration between Amazon and UCLA Samueli established in 2021.