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working paper2026Flagship manuscript

N'Ko as Computational Infrastructure

This paper treats N'Ko as computational infrastructure rather than an output font. It consolidates script-native ASR, phonemically interpretable evaluation, and governance around tone correction into one measurement thesis: the script used for evaluation changes what an error rate means.

Paper workspace

Live draft structure

release-candidate

Artifacts

Draft PDF

Rendered from the current N'Ko ASR consolidation draft. Public for reading, not final citation copy.

Open artifact

Split paper: script invisibility

Companion split-paper render from the final N'Ko paper set.

Open artifact

Split paper: phonemic evaluation

Companion split-paper render for N'Ko phonemic evaluation.

Open artifact

Split paper: script-native ASR anchor

Companion split-paper render for the direct script-native ASR anchor.

Open artifact

Split paper: AGP deployment

Companion split-paper render for governed deployment and correction.

Open artifact

Editable source

Live manuscript source exists and should continue changing until the final release gate is explicit.

Source anchors

nko-brain-scanner/paper/current/paper_canonical_nko_agp_20cer.tex

nko-brain-scanner/paper/final/01-script-invisibility/paper.tex

nko-brain-scanner/paper/final/02-phonemic-evaluation/paper.tex

nko-brain-scanner/paper/final/03-script-native-asr-anchor/paper.tex

nko-brain-scanner/paper/final/04-agp-deployment/paper.tex

Method tags

script-native ASRCTC decodingAGP governancephonemic evaluation

Ingest intersections

nkoasrctctonegovernancelow-resource

Status

31 pages, builds clean. Companion papers in preparation.

Key claims

01

Character error rate is not script-neutral for low-resource languages.

02

N'Ko can expose phonemic structure that Latin-script intermediaries hide.

03

Tone correction needs acoustic evidence and governance, not text fluency alone.

Public reading note

Readable public summary now; full PDF should wait for release decision.

Standard skeleton

What this paper must keep proving

Schema

problem

Standard ASR metrics treat script choice as neutral, then hide phonemic structure inside an inherited orthography.

method

Train and evaluate script-native N'Ko recognition, then separate proposal generation from acoustic governance.

implementation

Whisper encoder, CoreML CTC head, deterministic candidate generation, Swift ranker, acoustic verification gates.

data

Private training/evaluation runs plus governed live packets. Public corpora remain broad acoustic candidates, not live truth.

evaluation

CER, phonemic interpretation, deployment gates, and acoustic verifier behavior. Live ASR remains a separate proof.

references

Low-resource ASR, CTC speech recognition, script-aware NLP, tone restoration, governed correction loops.

openQuestions

How much of the remaining error is acoustic evidence, script modeling, tone recovery, or live-mic frontend mismatch.

Checkpoints and references

Proof chain

experimentpartial

Offline script-native ASR result

nko-brain-scanner training/evaluation artifacts

Supports the offline recognition claim. It does not prove stable live iPhone ASR.

implementationproven

On-device deployment path

Whisper/CoreML encoder plus CTC head iPhone harness

Proves the pipeline can execute on device, with live reliability still gated separately.

implementationproven

Governed correction boundary

acoustic-gate packet review and no-machine-truth gates

Prevents garbage output and public labels from silently becoming truth.

Reference links

Living SpeechsupportsFACextends

External CTC and low-resource ASR referencesneeds-citationrelated-work slot