Bonaventure F. P. Dossou is a Beninese artificial intelligence researcher, computer scientist, author, and technology pioneer with a robust background in mathematics, healthcare, and language technology. He is a leading contributor to the computational study of Fon, the main language spoken in Benin, including its integration into Google Translate, and a champion of the inclusion of marginalized languages on global digital platforms.

He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science at McGill University, where he is a member of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) group under the supervision of Professor Jackie Cheung. His research focuses on Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and AI for Healthcare, with particular emphasis on low-resource African languages, speech technologies, and applied AI in resource-constrained settings.

Bonaventure's academic background bridges mathematics, healthcare, and language technology. He holds a Bachelor of Science with honours in Mathematics from Kazan Federal University and a Master of Science with honours in Computer Science and Data Engineering (with a minor in Bioinformatics) from Jacobs University Bremen.

He has developed several Afro-centric NLP systems for low-resource languages, including FFRTranslate, AfroLM, and the Okwugbe ASR Python library for low-resource speech recognition. His work consistently centers African languages and communities, with the goal of expanding access to language technologies for populations historically underserved by mainstream AI systems.

Previously, he worked as a Machine Learning Consultant and Research Scientist at Phagos Biotech, where he developed large-scale language models for genomic sequencing and bacteriophage research. He was also a research intern at the Mila Quebec AI Institute, collaborating with Yoshua Bengio and Dianbo Liu on drug discovery using deep learning and GFlowNets, particularly for biological sequence design and GFlowOut. He also previously worked as an NLP Data Scientist at Roche Canada and as a Research Scientist at ModelisLabs on health and pharma-related challenges.

Alongside his academic work, he contributes to community-driven and international initiatives advancing equitable language technologies. He is a United Nations University scholar, a co-founder of Lanfrica, a platform dedicated to documenting and connecting African language resources, and an active contributor to the Masakhane Research Foundation. He has also collaborated with Google Research on equitable language technologies.

His work has received international recognition and multiple awards. You can find his CV here.

Past Work and Research Experiences

1. Mila Scientist in Residence [Probe Medical]
2. Mila Scientist in Residence (AI for Chemical Compound Discovery) [Modelis]
3. ML Student Researcher [Google Research]
3. Research Intern (AI for Drug Discovery) [Mila Quebec AI Institute]
4. ML Research Scientist Consultant (AI for Drug Discovery) [Phagos]
5. NLP Research Intern [Roche Canada]
7. Senior Machine Learning Engineer [Omdena]
8. African NLP Researcher & Core Member [Masakhane]
9. Part-time Senior Data Scientist [Speeqo]
10. Fundamental Research Scientist [Lelapa AI]

Selected Publications

All publications can be accessed through my Semantic Scholar and Google Scholar pages.

1. Towards Open-Ended Discovery for Low-Resource NLP Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Henri Aïdasso (EMNLP 2025)
2. Early Prediction of Postpartum Mood Disorders from Longitudinal Wearable Biometrics using deep learning and times series generative adversarial network Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Mercy Nyamewaa Asiedu, Maja Mataric, Katherine A Heller, Belen Lafon, Nichole Young-Lin (MLHC 2025)
3. Rethinking Full Finetuning from Pretraining Checkpoints in Active Learning for African Languages Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Ines Arous, Jackie C. K. Cheung (ACL 2025)
4. AfriMed-QA: Towards A Pan-African, Multi-Specialty, Medical Question-Answering Benchmark Dataset Tobi Olatunji, Charles Nimo,..., Bonaventure F. P. Dossou,... (ACL 2025)
5. Adapting Pretrained ASR Models to Low-resource Clinical Speech using Epistemic Uncertainty-based Data Selection. Bonaventure F. P. Dossou (ACL 2025)
6. A Study of Acquisition Functions for Medical Imaging Deep Active Learning Bonaventure F. P. Dossou (Deep Learning Indaba 2023)
7. FonMTL: Towards Multitask Learning for the Fon Language. Bonaventure F. P. Dossou et.al. (EMNLP 2023)
8. AfriSpeechNames: Most ASR models "butcher" African Names. Tobi Olatunji, Tejumade Afonja, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou et.al. (Interspeech 2023)
9. Pretrained Vision Models for Predicting High-Risk Breast Cancer Stage. Bonaventure F. P. Dossou et.al. (ICLR 2023)
10. GFlowOut: Dropout with Generative Flow Networks. Dianbo Liu, Moksh Jain, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou et.al. (ICML 2023)
11. AfroLM: A Self-Active Learning-based Multilingual Pretrained Language Model for 23 African Languages. Bonaventure F. P. Dossou et.al. (EMNLP 2022)
12. Biological Sequence Design with GFlowNets. Moksh Jain, Emmanuel Bengio, Alex Hernandez-Garcia, Jarrid Rector-Brooks, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou et.al. (ICML 2022)
13. MeSH2Matrix: Machine learning-driven biomedical relation classification based on the MeSH keywords of PubMed scholarly publications. Houcemeddine Turki, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou et.al. (ECIR 2022)
14. GraphCC for Diverse and Novel Antimicrobial Peptides Generation and Selection. Bonaventure F. P. Dossou et.al. (preprint)
15. OkwuGbé: End-to-End Speech Recognition for Fon and Igbo. Bonaventure F. P. Dossou et.al. (EMNLP 2021)
16. MMTAfrica: Multilingual Machine Translation for African Languages. Chris C. Emezue and Bonaventure F. P. Dossou (EMNLP 2021)
17. FSER: Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Speech Emotion Recognition. Bonaventure F. P. Dossou et.al. (ICCV 2021)
18. Crowdsourced Phrase-Based Tokenization for Low-Resourced Neural Machine Translation: The Case of Fon Language. Bonaventure F. P. Dossou et.al. (EACL 2021)
19. AfriVEC: Word Embedding Models for African Languages. Case Study of Fon and Nobiin. Bonaventure F. P. Dossou et.al. (EACL 2021)
20. FFR v1.1: Fon-French Neural Machine Translation. Bonaventure F. P. Dossou et.al. (ACL 2020)

Awards, Honours, Grants & Services

1. Borealis AI PhD Fellowship Award (2024)
2. University Scholars Leadership Symposium Delegate (2024)
3. Honorable Mention Solution for the Nightingale Contest for Detecting Active Tuberculosis Bacilli (2024) 4. Two Best Poster Awards at the Deep Learning Indaba Conference (2023)
5. Winner of AIM-AHEAD Health Equity Data Challenge (2023)
6. Winner of Nightingale Predicting High-Risk Breast Cancer Contexts (2022, 2023)
7. Mila Quebec AI Institute's Impact Annual Reports (2022, 2023)
8. McGill Engineering Doctoral Award (2022)
9. Innovation Award 2022 of the German African Diaspora (2022)
10. Jacobs University's Dean's Prize for outstanding Master's Thesis (2022)
11. Shuttleworth Flash Grant (2021)
12. Winner of the ViVaTech-Unesco Challenge for Cracking Language Barriers through Data and AI (2021)
13. Wikimedia Foundation Research of the Year Award 2021 (2021)
14. Grant "Lacuna Fund" for Named Entity Recognition for Fon with Masakhane Community (2021)
15. Jacobs University Community Award for Innovation, Cultural Understanding, and Diversity (2021)
16. Jacobs University Mobility Area's Scholarship & Jacobs University Faces (2020-2022)
17. Global Nominee and Benin's finalist with «Afro Num» - NASA's World Space Apps Challenge (2020)
18. Winner of the National Russian AI Hackathon (2019)
19. International interviews and articles on BBC, Voice of America, German, Russian newspapers, and TVs (2020-)
20. Scientific presentations and publications, Workshops organizations, and Reviewing Services at ACL, EACL, NAACL, AACL, EMNLP, ICML, ICLR, NeuRIPs (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024)