The Register Gap: A Meaning Intelligence Framework for Nigerian Public Discourse
Why AI misses what Nigerians really mean when they speak
AI systems fail at understanding Nigerian discourse not because they can't translate the words, but because they miss the context that flips meaning entirely. Researchers built a nine-dimension framework to capture what actually matters—register, irony, coded subtext, true intent—and showed that teaching an AI model this framework jumps its accuracy from 33% to 73% on register alone, with similar gains across other dimensions of real communicative intent.
Nigeria's 200+ million people speak across multiple languages and registers, often deliberately layering meaning through irony and coded speech that looks neutral on the surface. Current AI systems designed for English fail here, producing chatbots and content filters that either censor harmless speech or miss actual harm. This framework and its public dataset give technologists and researchers a concrete tool to build systems that actually understand Nigerian voices—critical as AI deployment accelerates across Africa.