From Script to Semantics: Prompting Strategies for African NLI
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated in multilingual settings, yet their inference behavior in low-resource African languages remains underexplored especially under pure prompting without fine-tuning. We present a systematic study of prompting strategies for Natural Language Inference (NLI) in Swahili, Yoruba, and Hausa using the AfriXNLI benchmark. We evaluate five prompting strategies Baseline (zero-shot), Script-Aware, Language Specific, Contrastive, and Native-Label Self-Translation (NL-STP) across two mid-sized open weight models (Llama3.2-3B and Gemma3-4B). To isolate the effect of prompt design, the effect of few-shot examples and Chain-of-Thought reasoning is el...
| Authors | Anuj Tiwari, Terry Oko-odion, Hannah Nwokocha |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 2 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 June 2026 |
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