Dr Haithem Afli
Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence, Munster Technological University, Cork.
Institutional Co-Lead, Rinn Artificial Intelligence at MTU · Principal Investigator, ADAPT Centre · Founder and Lead, Human-Centred AI Research Group.
Research vision
AI should not simply become more capable. It should become more trustworthy, multilingual, culturally aware and human-centred.
Dedicated research programmes
- Cultural Adaptation in NLP — culturally grounded multilingual language models, cultural reasoning and evaluation.
- Beyond the Benchmark — dynamic and distribution-based evaluation in NLP.
Research programmes
Multilingual & Culturally Aware AI
Language technologies for high- and low-resource languages and cultures — the primary programme.
Trustworthy & Human-Centred AI
Privacy-preserving, explainable and accountable machine learning.
Evaluation Science
Rigorous methods for evaluating language models and translation.
Selected achievements
Institutional Co-Lead, Rinn Artificial Intelligence at MTU
Leadership 2026 — National research-centre leadership role in a national Research Ireland programme.
Principal Investigator & MTU Lead, ADAPT Centre
Leadership 2021 — Institutional leadership in a national research centre.
European patent — On-Air Split Federated Learning (WO/2024/227944)
Patent 2024 — Translated trustworthy-AI research into protected intellectual property.
Keynote — “The Language of Life”, Hologenomic Data Analysis Symposium (Brazil)
Keynote 2024 — International keynote linking NLP and genomics.
Findings of EMNLP 2025 — GASE and sign-language translation evaluation
Publication 2025 — Peer-reviewed *ACL-venue publications in evaluation and multilingual AI.
Leadership & current projects
Institutional Co-Lead of Rinn Artificial Intelligence at MTU and Principal Investigator in the ADAPT Centre.
Rinn AI
Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland · Institutional Co-Lead at MTU; Deputy Theme Lead (Inclusive Language Model & Translation Methods); Principal Investigator
ADAPT Centre
Research Ireland · MTU Lead Investigator
Latest publications
Latest: ADAPT–MTU HAI at IWSLT2026: Robust Cascaded Speech Translation for Bhojpuri–Hindi and Irish–English — Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2026), 2026
Recent:
- PTEB: Towards Robust Text Embedding Evaluation via Stochastic Paraphrasing at Evaluation Time with LLMs — Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026), Long Papers, 2026
- Enhancing Dialectal Arabic Intent Detection through Cross-Dialect Multilingual Input Augmentation — Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Arabic Corpus Linguistics (WACL-4), 2025
- Rethinking Sign Language Translation: The Impact of Signer Dependence on Model Evaluation — Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, 2025
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Contact
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