Nairobi · since 2022
Halima Abdullahi
Machines are learning Somali from people like me. I want them to learn it properly, with the proverbs.
- Role
- Labeller, Rungwell at Home
- Centre
- Nairobi
- Joined
- 2022
- Works on
- Somali and Kiswahili text, transcription review
Halima Abdullahi lives in Eastleigh with her mother and two younger brothers. She trained as a primary teacher and taught for a year before her mother’s illness meant someone had to be at home during the day.
She joined Rungwell at Home in 2022. She works on Somali and Kiswahili text: classifying, correcting transcriptions and checking machine translations. Much of the Somali she reviews was produced by software that learned from earlier reviewers, and she keeps a notebook of the phrases it still gets wrong, which the team now uses as a reference.
She works the morning shift so that her afternoons are free for her mother’s appointments, and comes to the centre once a quarter for a calibration day, “to remember what my colleagues look like”.
Her object is the flask of tea she makes before every shift, and the notebook.