Which Nigerian-Pidgin does Generative AI speak?: Issues about Representativeness and Bias for Multilingual and Low Resource Languages

Anonymous

Abstract: Naija is the Nigerian-Pidgin spoken by approx. 120M speakers in Nigeria and it is a mixed language (e.g., English, Portuguese and Indigenous languages). Although it has mainly been a spoken language until recently, there are currently two written genres (BBC and Wikipedia) in Naija as well. Through statistical analyses and Machine Translation experiments, we prove that these two genres do not represent each other (i.e., there are linguistic differences in word order and vocabulary) and Generative AI operates only based on Naija written in the BBC genre which leads to bias in terms of representativeness.

Paper Type: short

Research Area: Ethics, Bias, and Fairness

Contribution Types: Approaches to low-resource settings, Data resources

Languages Studied: Nigerian-Pidgin, English

Preprint Status: We are considering releasing a non-anonymous preprint in the next two months (i.e., during the reviewing process).

A1: yes

A1 Elaboration For Yes Or No: section 7

A2: no

A3: yes

A3 Elaboration For Yes Or No: section 6

B: yes

B1: yes

B1 Elaboration For Yes Or No: section 2

B2: yes

B2 Elaboration For Yes Or No: section appendix C

B3: yes

B3 Elaboration For Yes Or No: section 3

B4: yes

B4 Elaboration For Yes Or No: section 2

B5: yes

B5 Elaboration For Yes Or No: section 2

B6: yes

B6 Elaboration For Yes Or No: section 2

C: yes

C1: yes

C1 Elaboration For Yes Or No: section appendix B

C2: yes

C2 Elaboration For Yes Or No: section 3

C3: yes

C3 Elaboration For Yes Or No: section 4

C4: no

D: yes

D1: yes

D1 Elaboration For Yes Or No: section 2

D2: no

D2 Elaboration For Yes Or No: we hire volunteers who are also authors of the paper.

D3: n/a

D4: n/a

D5: n/a

E: no

E1: yes

E1 Elaboration For Yes Or No: section 4