arXiv subjects

Mercy Muchai

Publications and source records attributed to Mercy Muchai.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

How Architecture, Typology, and Adaptation Strategies Shape ASR for Low-Resource African Languages: A Controlled Empirical Study

Despite recent advancements in ASR, identifying effective architectures, fine-tuning approaches, and data adaptation strategies for low-resource languages remains challenging. We present a systematic comparison across five low-resource African languages and Swahili as a mid-resource contrast, fine-tuning three models from distinct architectures: Phi-4-multimodal-instruct, Whisper-large-v3-turbo, and MMS-1B-all. We analyze data sufficiency, monolingual versus multilingual adaptation, domain fine-tuning, and language-adapter transfer. Phi-4 achieves the best overall accuracy, MMS shows comparable CER, while Whisper exhibits high CER, consistent with known hallucinations and repetition loops. Performance saturates at different data scales, offering practical data-efficiency targets, while typological complexity consistently shapes error rates. Domain fine-tuning benefits Phi-4 and Whisper but degrades MMS, revealing limitations of adapter-based adaptation. Proxy language adapters outperform training MMS adapters from scratch.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Toward Cultural Alignment: Human-Centered Evaluation of Multimodal AI Stories Across Five African Communities

In this paper, we examine how well AI-generated multimodal stories align with the lived practices, relationships, language, values, and visual expectations of the communities they represent. We conduct a community-grounded mixed-methods evaluation with 19 culture representatives across five African communities, combining quantitative annotations with qualitative focus group discussions. We find that cultural alignment depends not simply on recognizable cultural markers, but on how those markers fit social, linguistic, procedural, and visual context. From these evaluations, we develop a taxonomy of cultural alignment comprising five broader cultural marker categories and eight recurring mechanisms of misalignment. We additionally evaluate five multimodal LLM judges to examine whether automated evaluation can approximate community-grounded judgments at scale. Judge reliability and score calibration vary substantially across communities, with no single judge performing consistently across all five settings. These findings motivate community-calibrated evaluation pipelines in which automated judges are validated against community judgments to determine where they can be trusted and where human review remains necessary.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Dukawalla: Voice Interfaces for Small Businesses in Africa

Small and medium sized businesses often struggle with data driven decision making do to a lack of advanced analytics tools, especially in African countries where they make up a majority of the workforce. Though many tools exist they are not designed to fit into the ways of working of SMB workers who are mobile first, have limited time to learn new workflows, and for whom social and business are tightly coupled. To address this, the Dukawalla prototype was created. This intelligent assistant bridges the gap between raw business data, and actionable insights by leveraging voice interaction and the power of generative AI. Dukawalla provides an intuitive way for business owners to interact with their data, aiding in informed decision making. This paper examines Dukawalla's deployment across SMBs in Nairobi, focusing on their experiences using this voice based assistant to streamline data collection and provide business insights

cs.HC↗