N'Ko Publication Readiness and Narrative Plan - 2026-05-03

You can still talk about the 20.57% CER result, but it should be framed as an archived checkpoint anchor, not as a completed May 2026 reproduction and not as proof that all controlled ASR comparisons are closed. The strongest public narrative is not "we solved Bambara ASR." The strongest narrative is: > Modern AI systems do not just perform badly on N'Ko. They reveal a deeper > infrastructure failure: the script is underrepresented in model vocabularies, > activations, benchmarks, and evaluation metrics. N'Ko's bijective design gives us a > cleaner way to measure and build Manding language technology, and the archived > 20.57% CER checkpoint shows that script-native ASR is technically viable enough to > justify the research direction. That narrative lets you use the 20.57% result without pretending the strict audit finished. Artifact: `[home]/Desktop/nko-brain-scanner/local_results_cache/paper4_reproduction_35205256/results.json`