Offiong Bassey

Hi 👋, I'm Offiong Bassey, a machine learning engineer and researcher specializing in Natural Language Processing (NLP). My work spans audio processing, speech synthesis, machine translation, and real-time conversational AI, with a particular focus on low-resource and multilingual languages.

My research explores how multilingual models can perform efficiently in low-resource settings, especially under limited data conditions. At Plotweaver, where I currently work as a Machine Learning Engineer, I apply this to improving the scalability and efficiency of language models for practical, real-world applications.

Outside of work, I enjoy reading, watching movies, singing classical choral music, playing the trumpet, and listening to podcasts on AI and technology.

offiong

News

Mar 2026

Paper (Adapting Foundational ASR Models to Efik) accepted to Speakable @ LREC 2026 - Spain.

Feb 2026

Awarded full sponsorship to attend the AfricaNLP Workshop @ EACL 2026, Rabat, Morocco.

Feb 2026

Joined PlotWeaver as a Machine Learning Research Engineer.

Jan 2026

Gave a talk @ Kabod Group on Funding opportunities for African Language Industry Projects.

Jan 2026

First paper accepted to AfricaNLP @ EACL 2026 - Morocco.


Selected Publications

All Publications

Speakable @ LREC 2026

Adapting Foundational ASR Models to Efik: An Empirical Study of an Extremely Low-Resource Tonal Language.

This paper investigates the adoption of state-of-the-art foundational ASR models such as XLS-R and Whisper through fine-tuning for Efik, a low-resource tonal language and empirically evaluates their performance.

AfricaNLP @ ACL 2026

Developing an English–Efik Corpus and Machine Translation System for Digital Inclusion.

This study evaluates the effectiveness of state-of-the-art multilingual neural machine translation models for English–Efik translation, leveraging a small-scale, community-curated parallel corpus of 13,865 sentence pairs.