arXiv subjects

Happymore Masoka

Publications and source records attributed to Happymore Masoka.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Shona spaCy: A Morphological Analyzer for an Under-Resourced Bantu Language

Despite rapid advances in multilingual natural language processing (NLP), the Bantu language Shona remains under-served in terms of morphological analysis and language-aware tools. This paper presents Shona spaCy, an open-source, rule-based morphological pipeline for Shona built on the spaCy framework. The system combines a curated JSON lexicon with linguistically grounded rules to model noun-class prefixes (Mupanda 1-18), verbal subject concords, tense-aspect markers, ideophones, and clitics, integrating these into token-level annotations for lemma, part-of-speech, and morphological features. The toolkit is available via pip install shona-spacy, with source code at https://github.com/HappymoreMasoka/shona-spacy and a PyPI release at https://pypi.org/project/shona-spacy/0.1.4/. Evaluation on formal and informal Shona corpora yields 90% POS-tagging accuracy and 88% morphological-feature accuracy, while maintaining transparency in its linguistic decisions. By bridging descriptive grammar and computational implementation, Shona spaCy advances NLP accessibility and digital inclusion for Shona speakers and provides a template for morphological analysis tools for other under-resourced Bantu languages.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Advancing Conversational AI with Shona Slang: A Dataset and Hybrid Model for Digital Inclusion

African languages remain underrepresented in natural language processing (NLP), with most corpora limited to formal registers that fail to capture the vibrancy of everyday communication. This work addresses this gap for Shona, a Bantu language spoken in Zimbabwe and Zambia, by introducing a novel Shona--English slang dataset curated from anonymized social media conversations. The dataset is annotated for intent, sentiment, dialogue acts, code-mixing, and tone, and is publicly available at https://github.com/HappymoreMasoka/Working_with_shona-slang. We fine-tuned a multilingual DistilBERT classifier for intent recognition, achieving 96.4\% accuracy and 96.3\% F1-score, hosted at https://huggingface.co/HappymoreMasoka. This classifier is integrated into a hybrid chatbot that combines rule-based responses with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to handle domain-specific queries, demonstrated through a use case assisting prospective students with graduate program information at Pace University. Qualitative evaluation shows the hybrid system outperforms a RAG-only baseline in cultural relevance and user engagement. By releasing the dataset, model, and methodology, this work advances NLP resources for African languages, promoting inclusive and culturally resonant conversational AI.

cs.CL↗