Mwando: Leveraging AI to Preserve and Teach shiKomori

Abstract:This paper presents Mwando, a virtual educational assistant designed to support the teaching and preservation of shiKomori, the language of the Comoros Islands. The system covers the four main dialectal variants (shiNgazidja, shiMwali, shiNdzuani and shiMaore) through a knowledge base constructed from phrases, proverbs, dictionaries and grammar lessons. A multi-agent architecture combining vector search, a knowledge graph and web search fallback enables accurate and context-aware responses. Evaluation on 500 queries demonstrates strong performance on vocabulary lookup and grammar explanations, while qualitative case studies illustrate both capabilities and current limitations. This work represents an initial step toward computational support for shiKomori and provides a blueprint for developing AI-powered educational tools for other low-resource languages.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2607.23481 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2607.23481v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.23481 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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