Hope Kerubo

Hope Kerubo is a Master's student at Maseno University and a Research Associate at MCAAI, where her work focuses on corpus creation for Ekegusii and Kuria — two Bantu languages spoken in the Kisii and Migori regions of Kenya that remain significantly under resourced in the computational linguistics landscape.

Hope's research involves the collection, annotation, and validation of text and speech data from native speaker communities, applying rigorous linguistic standards to ensure that the resulting corpora are suitable for downstream NLP tasks including language modelling, machine translation, and speech recognition. She conducts field data collection sessions with community contributors across the Kisii and South Nyanza regions, working closely with local linguists and cultural custodians to ensure that the data she collects accurately reflects the full breadth of each language's vocabulary, grammar, and usage patterns.

Her work is expanding the linguistic coverage of MCAAI's datasets and contributing to the digital preservation of two languages that face growing displacement pressure from dominant regional languages such as Kiswahili and Dholuo. By creating open, well documented corpora for Ekegusii and Kuria, Hope is helping to ensure that these languages have a presence in the AI systems of the future — and that their speakers are not left behind in the transition to AI mediated digital communication.

Hope is supervised jointly by Dr. Vivian Oloo and Dr. Lilian Wanzare, and her corpus work feeds directly into MCAAI's multilingual language model development pipeline.