WAZOBIALABS/nigerian-pidgin-voice-text

Wazobia Labs — Nigerian Pidgin Emotion & Sentiment Dataset

Version: v0.8 — May 2026 Entries: 550 annotated entries Builder: Wazobia Labs License: CC-BY-4.0 — commercial use permitted with attribution Contact: wazobialabs@gmail.com Language: Nigerian Pidgin (Naija) — ISO 639-3: pcm

---

What This Is

The first commercially licensed Nigerian Pidgin emotion and sentiment dataset — built from lived native speaker knowledge, not translated from English, not scraped from news broadcasts, not built for academic publication.

Built for the product team, not the paper.

Nigerian Pidgin is spoken by over 100 million people across Nigeria and the Nigerian diaspora. Every AI system currently deployed for Nigerian users — health chatbots, fintech customer service, voice assistants — is operating without any verified understanding of how Nigerian Pidgin speakers actually communicate. There is no evaluation benchmark. There is no culturally grounded emotion taxonomy. There is no sarcasm corpus.

Wazobia Labs builds what they deliberately left out.

---

Dataset Summary

Specification	v0.8
Total entries	550
Emotion categories	16
Sentiment labels	positive / negative / neutral
Sarcasm pairs	28 complete pairs (39 sarcasm entries total)
Health domain entries	100
Female speaker representation	~45%
Register coverage	casual / street / proverbial
License	CC-BY-4.0
Language	Nigerian Pidgin (pcm)

---

The 16-Category Emotion Taxonomy

This dataset introduces the Wazobia Labs Nigerian Pidgin emotion taxonomy — 16 categories, four with no equivalent in any existing NLP framework:

Category	Type	Definition
forming	Nigerian-specific ★	Deliberately performing emotional indifference as social armour. Acting unbothered on purpose. A mask worn in public. AI reads this as neutral and misses everything.
hustle_fatigue	Nigerian-specific ★	The specific exhaustion of sustained economic grinding where stopping is not an option. Not burnout — the kind where you cannot afford to stop. Rest later, the rent is due.
hustle_energy	Nigerian-specific ★	Fired-up grind motivation. Defiant optimism about economic achievement. Often includes the Lagos "before 30" cultural timeline urgency.
market_energy	Nigerian-specific ★	The sharp, alert, competitive transactional register of Lagos commerce. Not aggression — a specific deal-making emotional state.
anger	Standard	Frustration, irritation, outrage
betrayal	Standard	Feeling deceived or disrespected by someone trusted
celebration	Standard	Communal wins, hype, collective joy
contempt	Standard	Cold downward dismissal — icy, not hot like anger
craving	Standard	Intense desire for something not yet present
joy	Standard	Genuine happiness, excitement, delight. Includes soft life expressions.
neutral	Standard	No specific emotion detectable
prayer_gratitude	Cultural	Spiritual thankfulness — the Nigerian testimony register
pride	Standard	Confidence, swagger, self-assurance
sarcasm	Critical	Meaning inversion through deadpan delivery — prosodically identical to sincere speech
shock	Standard	Surprise mixed with disbelief
suspicion	Standard	Wariness, awareness of attempted manipulation

---

Category Distribution

Category	Entries
neutral	94
hustle_fatigue	71
pride	45
anger	40
prayer_gratitude	36
joy	30
sarcasm	28
celebration	25
forming	25
shock	25
suspicion	24
contempt	24
hustle_energy	21
craving	21
betrayal	21
market_energy	20
Total	550

---

Why This Dataset Exists

The BBC Pidgin Problem

The most cited Nigerian Pidgin NLP resource is the BBC Pidgin corpus — compiled from formal news broadcasts. It has four sentiment labels. It contains no sarcasm pairs, almost no health language, and skews male.

A model trained on BBC Pidgin data cannot:

• Detect that "You don try well well" is sarcasm when delivered deadpan
• Classify "I no fit shout" as hustle_fatigue rather than generic negativity
• Read "E don do, I just dey manage" as clinical resignation rather than neutral filler
• Understand that "I dey my lane" is forming — performed indifference — not genuine contentment

Wazobia Labs builds the dataset that fills these gaps.

The Sarcasm Gap

Nigerian sarcasm is delivered deadpan — prosodically identical to sincere speech. The exact same phrase can mean the opposite depending entirely on cultural context.

This dataset contains 28 complete sarcasm pairs: the same Pidgin phrase annotated twice — once sincere, once sarcastic — with annotator notes documenting the contextual conditions that determine which reading applies.

The Health Domain

100 health domain entries capture how Nigerian patients communicate about their health in natural Pidgin. This matters because:

"E don do, I just dey manage" — AI reads neutral. It means a patient has given up trying to get better. That is a clinical signal.

"My body no dey again oh" — AI reads negative/frustration. It means physical depletion so severe the speaker cannot function normally.

Health AI deployed for Nigerian users without this layer of understanding will miss the moments that matter most.

---

Data Fields

Each entry contains 15 fields:

Field	Description	Values
entry_id	Unique identifier	WZ-T-XXXX format
pidgin_text	Nigerian Pidgin text	Raw text
english_gloss	Plain English meaning	Text
sentiment	Overall sentiment	positive / negative / neutral
emotion_category	Primary emotion	16-category taxonomy
emotion_secondary	Secondary emotion	16-category taxonomy or blank
register	Language register	casual / street / proverbial
sarcasm_flag	Sarcasm indicator	yes / no
prosody_match	Tone vs meaning alignment	matched / contradicts / neutral
annotator_notes	Cultural context and rationale	Text
topic_domain	Subject domain	health / money / work / social / faith / relationship / conflict / motivation / emotion / food / greeting / life
speaker_gender	Speaker gender	female / neutral
intensity	Emotion strength	1–5
source_type	Entry origin	original / overheard / social_media / adapted
date_added	Annotation date	ISO date

---

Annotation Methodology

Cultural Authority

Every annotation decision in this dataset was made by a native speaker with lived fluency across three Nigerian Pidgin registers:

• Warri Pidgin — the original creole form, Delta State origin
• Eastern Nigerian Pidgin — Owerri and Aba variants
• Lagos Pidgin — the urban cosmopolitan form

The lead annotator is an Igbo woman born in Aba, raised in Warri, educated in Owerri, living in Lagos. This trajectory is the methodology. Cultural authority — not institutional backing — is the foundation.

Bottom-Up Taxonomy Construction

Standard NLP emotion taxonomies are constructed top-down from existing psychological literature. This approach fails for Nigerian Pidgin because the psychological literature was not built on Nigerian speakers.

The Wazobia Labs taxonomy was constructed bottom-up: emotion categories were identified from observed native speaker expression in natural Pidgin communication, then formalised as annotation labels. Only categories that (a) cannot be accurately represented by existing taxonomy labels, (b) appear with sufficient frequency in natural Pidgin, and (c) can be defined clearly enough for consistent inter-annotator application were included.

Sarcasm Pair Protocol

Each sarcastic entry is paired with its sincere twin — the same phrase annotated as if spoken sincerely. Both entries carry prosody_match: matched because Nigerian sarcasm is prosodically identical to sincere speech. The sarcastic entry is additionally flagged sarcasm_flag: yes with annotator notes documenting the contextual conditions for the sarcastic reading.

---

Companion Datasets

WAZOBIALABS/nigerian-pidgin-eval Gold-standard evaluation set — v0.3 — 253 entries — all 16 categories at minimum 15 entries — 28 sarcasm pairs — 40 health entries

WAZOBIALABS/igbo-voice-text Igbo emotion dataset — v0.1 — 50 entries — 14 Igbo-specific emotion categories

---

Version History

Version	Entries	Date	Notes
v0.1	50	March 2026	Initial release
v0.2	100	April 2026	Expanded
v0.3	200	April 2026	Taxonomy expanded
v0.4	300	April 2026	Health domain added
v0.5	400	May 2026	Sarcasm pairs expanded
v0.6	484	May 2026	Full taxonomy coverage
v0.7	500	May 2026	Eval set published
v0.8	550	May 2026	Native speaker corrections, 100 health entries, continuous entry IDs WZ-T-0001 to WZ-T-0550

---

Roadmap

Milestone	Target
Inter-annotator agreement published	June 2026
arXiv paper — taxonomy methodology	June 2026
1,000 entries	Month 3
Voice recordings begin	Month 4
Igbo dataset — 200 entries	Month 3
v1.0 public release	Q3 2026

---

Citation

@dataset{wazobia_labs_pidgin_2026,
  author    = {Okoye, Stephanie Nkemjika},
  title     = {Wazobia Labs Nigerian Pidgin Emotion and Sentiment Dataset},
  year      = {2026},
  version   = {0.8.0},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  url       = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/WAZOBIALABS/nigerian-pidgin-voice-text},
  license   = {CC-BY-4.0},
  note      = {First commercially licensed Nigerian Pidgin emotion dataset with 16-category cultural taxonomy}
}

---

Licensing

Published under CC-BY-4.0 — free to use for research, academic, and commercial purposes with attribution.

Enterprise licensing with support, update guarantees, version locking, and integration documentation available separately.

Contact: wazobialabs@gmail.com

---

About Wazobia Labs

Wazobia Labs builds African language AI infrastructure that does not exist but should. We identify the specific, high-value gaps in African language data that existing datasets leave open — then build exactly those gaps with commercial licensing, production-grade quality, and the cultural specificity that real AI products need.

Not another Twitter scrape. Not another scripted studio recording. We build what they deliberately left out.

HuggingFace	WAZOBIALABS
Contact	wazobialabs@gmail.com
Founded	Lagos, Nigeria — 2026