@inproceedings{adelani-etal-2025-generative,
    title = "Does Generative {AI} speak {N}igerian-{P}idgin?: Issues about Representativeness and Bias for Multilingualism in {LLM}s",
    author = {Adelani, David Ifeoluwa  and
      Do{\u{g}}ru{\"o}z, A. Seza  and
      Shode, Iyanuoluwa  and
      Aremu, Anuoluwapo},
    editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis  and
      Ritter, Alan  and
      Wang, Lu",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025",
    month = apr,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.findings-naacl.85/",
    pages = "1571--1583",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-195-7",
    abstract = "Nigeria is a multilingual country with 500+ languages. Naija is a Nigerian Pidgin spoken by approximately 120M speakers and it is a mixed language (e.g., English, Portuguese, Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo). Although it has mainly been a spoken language until recently, there are some online platforms (e.g., Wikipedia), publishing in written Naija as well. West African Pidgin English (WAPE) is also spoken in Nigeria and it is used by BBC to broadcast news on the internet to a wider audience not only in Nigeria but also in other West African countries (e.g., Cameroon and Ghana). Through statistical analyses and Machine Translation experiments, our paper shows that these two pidgin varieties do not represent each other (i.e., there are linguistic differences in word order and vocabulary) and Generative AI operates only based on WAPE. In other words, Naija is underrepresented in Generative AI, and it is hard to teach LLMs with few examples. In addition to the statistical analyses, we also provide historical information on both pidgins as well as insights from the interviews conducted with volunteer Wikipedia contributors in Naija."
}