Natural language processing for multilingual communities

I’m Debby Oluwatuyi, a PhD researcher in natural language processing at the University of Sussex, supervised by Prof. Julie Weeds.

My research focuses on code-switching, low-resource languages and how we evaluate language models, starting with Nigerian Pidgin-English.

I’m also on an industrial placement as an NLP research engineer at CASM Technology. Before research, I built data systems for fast-growing companies across Africa and Europe.

Debby Oluwatuyi wearing glasses, photographed outdoors

Research interests

Code-switching

How multilingual speakers weave languages together in a single sentence, and why modern NLP models still stumble over something so natural to people.

Low-resource languages

Most language models are fluent in a handful of languages and polite guests in the rest. I work on the ones their training data barely covers, starting with Nigerian Pidgin-English.

LLM evaluation & safety

Testing how robust LLMs really are in code-switched and low-resource settings, and asking what “safe” means once these models reach the Global South.