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

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. 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. In other words, Naija written in Wikipedia genre is not represented in Generative AI.