Chibuzor Okocha
I am a PhD student in Engineering with a minor in Computer Science at the University of Florida, where I am privileged to be a member of the UF DataStudio Lab. Previously, I worked on building speech and audio models for African languages and accents.
My research is focused on Speech and Audio AI, reasoning in Audio Language Models, and developing robust systems for accented and multilingual speech processing. I am passionate about creating inclusive AI systems that work across multiple languages and cultures.
Beyond research, I am passionate about mentoring aspiring AI researchers, building open science communities, and contributing to collaborative initiatives. I firmly believe in democratizing access to knowledge and fostering collaborative ecosystems.
Recent News
Presenting poster "Can Large Audio Language Models Understand Child Stuttering Speech? Speech Summarization, and Source Separation" at ASRU 2025 Satellite Workshop in Hawaii.
Submitted three papers to ICASSP 2026 on neural audio codecs and child speech analysis with LALMs.
Excited to present my research at the TTIC Summer Workshop on Foundations of Speech and Audio Foundation Models in Chicago.
Excited to present our AfriSpeech-Dialog work at NAACL 2025.
Presented research on intercultural understanding at FIE 2024 conference.
Research Areas
Speech and Audio AI
Developing advanced AI systems for speech and audio processing applications
Audio Language Models
Researching reasoning capabilities and cognitive processes in audio language models
Accented Speech Recognition
Building robust speech recognition systems for diverse accents and dialects
Multilingual Audio AI
Creating inclusive AI systems that work across multiple languages and cultures
Recent Publications
Afrispeech-Dialog: A Benchmark Dataset for Spontaneous English Conversations in Healthcare and Beyond
NAACL 2025 | Mardhiyah Sanni, Tassallah Abdullahi, Devendra D. Kayande, Emmanuel Ayodele, Naome A. Etori, Michael S. Mollel, Moshood Yekini, Chibuzor Okocha, et al.
A comprehensive dataset for evaluating ASR and summarization on African-accented speech conversations.
AfriVox: Probing Multilingual and Accent Robustness of Speech LLMs
ACL ARR July 2025 (Under Review) | OpenReview
Open-source benchmark across 20 African languages and 100+ African English accents, evaluating multimodal speech LLMs vs traditional ASR/AST models.
Neural Audio Codec Evaluation for Low-Resource African Languages
ICASSP 2026 (Under Review) | Chibuzor Okocha, et al.
Comprehensive evaluation framework for neural audio codecs on African speech data and low-resource language settings.
Can large audio language models understand child stuttering speech?
ICASSP 2026 (Under Review) | Chibuzor Okocha, Maya Bakri, Christan Grant | arXiv
Evaluating LALMs on disfluent child speech for source separation and summarization tasks.
Domain-Aware Speaker Diarization On African-Accented English
arXiv preprint (Under Review) | Chibuzor Okocha, Kelechi Ezema, Christan Grant | arXiv
Examining domain effects in speaker diarization for African-accented English across general and clinical dialogues.
Featured Projects
AfriSpeech-200
Pan-African speech dataset with 100+ accents and 196+ hours of audio for ASR research.
CodecEval-Africa
Neural audio codecs evaluation framework for low-resource African language settings.
Child Speech Analysis with LALMs
Large Audio Language Models for child interview summarization and speaker separation.