From the archive
Week 3310 – 16 Aug 202619 papers
Educational platforms in under-resourced and multilingual contexts, such as Nigeria, often struggle with limited personalisation, inadequate language support, and weak curriculum internationalisation, leading to reduced learner engagement and inclusivity. This…
Objectives Medication adherence remains a major challenge in the management of type 2 diabetes (T2D), especially in middle-income countries such as Morocco. With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, large language models, including ChatGPT, may of…
Large language model providers routinely cite multilingual safety benchmarks spanning a dozen or more languages as evidence that their models are safe for non-English-speaking users. We show that these collection-level coverage claims frequently do not survive…
Malaria, caused by Plasmodium spp., remains a leading cause of mortality in sub-Saharan Africa, with an estimated 282 million cases and 610,000 deaths in 2024. The var gene family primarily drives the virulence of P. falciparum, encoding the polymorphic adhesi…
The escalating food security crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa, driven by population growth and climate volatility, necessitates robust agricultural monitoring and prediction systems. However, existing approaches often rely on historical trends and struggle to capt…
This study examines the nature and function of code-switching among students in higher institutions of learning in Adamawa State, Nigeria, a linguistically diverse region where English, Hausa, Nigerian Pidgin, and indigenous languages interact in daily commu…
The introduction of the Kencorpus Swahili Question Answering Dataset (KenSwQuAD) presents a compelling opportunity to advance Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) for the Swahili language. However, the mixed composition of this dataset—comprising 67.6\% extract…
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into open and distance learning (ODeL) is reshaping engagement and retention in sub-Saharan Africa and offering new opportunities while also presenting significant constraints. In this conceptual paper, we examin…
This paper investigates phonemic contrasts in Hausa through the analysis of minimal pairs occurring in word-initial, medial, and final positions. The study employs a descriptive qualitative research design. Data were obtained from Hausa lexical items using s…
This research work focused on language endagerment and revitalissation. The aim of this research is study the linguistic influence of Hausa on Kamuku, a Kainji language spoken in parts of Niger and Kaduna States, Nigeria. Due to centuries of trade, intermarria…
In South Africa, many Grade 4 learners transition from first-language instruction to English as the language of learning and teaching (LoLT). This often occurs without sufficient support for the development and transfer of foundational phonological and literac…
The global food system is constantly being constrained by biotic and abiotic challenges, resulting in instability and insecurity, particularly in regions like sub-Saharan Africa, where agricultural productivity often remains below global averages. Microbial bi…
Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs) is largely developed in English, assuming these safeguards generalize across multilingual settings. However, this assumption remains underexplored and exposes a vulnerability in low-resource languages. We invest…
This research paper attempts a discussion on reduplication process of Hausa as spoken in Yola and Jimeta in Adamawa State. It documents, the Hausa speech forms as spoken by Hausa speakers in the respected areas of study. These papers also analyse Reduplication…
Low-resource automatic speech recognition (ASR) commonly relies on cross-lingual transfer, where models are adapted from higher-resource donor languages. However, selecting donors remains challenging for spontaneous speech from under-resourced language communi…
The study examines silence in Tigun-Njuande language and communication in Taraba State. It aims to explain the sociolinguistic functions of silence in Tigun-Njuande dialect in communication. Despite its significance to communication within the communities’ sil…
The global oil and gas industry has been increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to solve knowledge management challenges and domain-specific large language models (LLMs) catering to the petroleum engineering industry are still scarce. This issue is …
Process industries are a major source of occupational injuries and fatalities worldwide due to safety violations. Nigeria alone has recorded more than 412 fatalities in the oil and gas industry and the construction industry has a documented history of accide…
Large language models are increasingly deployed as general-purpose educational and technical assistance systems, but their underlying infrastructure does not treat languages equally. One underexamined source of disparity is tokenization: semantically equivalen…
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