The Register Gap: A Meaning Intelligence Framework for Nigerian Public Discourse

Abstract

We introduce the Meaning Intelligence Framework (MIF), a nine-dimension annotation and evaluation schema for Nigerian public discourse that separates surface sentiment from true communicative intent. Existing benchmarks for Nigerian languages, including NaijaSenti and AfriSenti, treat sentiment classification as a three-way polarity task. We argue that the dominant failure mode of AI systems on Nigerian discourse is not translation failure but context failure: the same utterance carries opposite pragmatic force depending on speaker, audience, and situation. The MIF operationalises this insight across nine scored dimensions: register, surface sentiment, true intent, irony, coded subtext, risk tier, annotator confidence, speaker emotion, and recommended communications action. We construct a 30-item calibration dataset spanning Standard English, Nigerian English, Nigerian Pidgin, and code-mixed registers, and evaluate three frontier language models (Gemini 2.5 Flash, GPT-5, and Gemini 2.5 Pro) under zero-shot and schema-informed prompting conditions. Two headline findings emerge. First, the Register Gap: zero-shot register classification accuracy is 33.3%, rising to 73.3% (+40 points) when the model receives the MIF schema in-context. Second, model capability and cultural competence are decoupled: GPT-5 (MIS 67.8) and Gemini 2.5 Pro (MIS 65.4) score lower than Flash (MIS 78.6), and neither benefits from schema-informed prompting. We release the framework specification, annotation guidelines, and calibration set to support reproducibility.