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README.md

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-short_description: AI research and open resources from Cameroon.
+short_description: Open AI research, datasets, and tools from Cameroon.
 ---
-# Cameroon Open Research Community
+# LAB 237 - Cameroon Open Research Community
 
-Welcome to the official hub of **LAB 237**. We are an academic and community-driven research group dedicated to advancing Natural Language Processing (NLP), speech technology, and Artificial Intelligence resources for Cameroonian languages, West African Pidgin, and regional dialects.
+Welcome to **LAB 237**, an independent, research-driven initiative advancing Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP), speech technology, data science, and open research resources. We build datasets, benchmarks, and practical AI tools addressing research challenges in Cameroon, across Africa, and beyond.
 
 ## 🎯 Our Mission
-* **Language Preservation:** Documenting and digitizing indigenous Cameroonian languages.
-* **Dataset Creation:** Building high-quality, open-source benchmarks for low-resource languages.
-* **Model Adaptation:** Fine-tuning small language models (SLMs) to make state-of-the-art AI efficient and accessible locally.
-* **Community Empowerment:** Creating accessible AI tools to bridge the digital language divide across Central and West Africa.
+- **Language Documentation:** Support the documentation, digitization, and computational study of Cameroonian languages and language varieties.
+- **Open Dataset Development:** Build carefully documented datasets and benchmarks for low-resource NLP, speech technology, and other AI applications.
+- **Research and Evaluation:** Develop reproducible methods for evaluating language models and speech systems in underrepresented linguistic settings.
+- **Accessible AI:** Explore efficient models, including small language models (SLMs), and practical AI tools suited to local needs and resource constraints.
+- **Community Collaboration:** Create opportunities for researchers, students, language speakers, and other collaborators to participate in responsible AI research.
 
-## 📦 Key Projects
-* **Camspoken NLI:** The first foundational Natural Language Inference dataset optimized for Cameroonian languages and Pidgin variants.
-* **Localized Text-to-SQL:** Building benchmarks and models that translate Cameroonian languages and Pidgin queries into executable database scripts (SQL).
+## 📦 Research Areas and Projects
 
-## ⚖️ Open Source Licensing
-To maximize global collaboration, scientific progress, and commercial accessibility, the Cameroon AI Research Lab operates under an open-source framework:
-* Unless stated otherwise, all software code, scripts, model architectures, and core assets published by this organization are licensed under the **Apache License 2.0**.
-* Individual dataset file repositories may inherit this permissive Apache infrastructure or utilize data-specific permissive open licenses (like **CC BY-NC 4.0**) to ensure unrestricted community integration.
+### Language and Speech Technology
 
-## 🤝 Collaborate
+- **CamSpokenNLI:** A research resource for spoken Natural Language Inference (NLI) in Cameroon Pidgin English and Camfranglais, investigating semantic reasoning, cross-variety transfer, and speech-recognition challenges.
+- **Cameroonian Speech Resources:** Research into speech data, transcription, and evaluation methods for underrepresented Cameroonian languages and varieties.
 
-We welcome collaboration from **researchers, lecturers, students, engineers, computational linguists, data scientists, and other contributors** interested in building AI resources for Cameroon and related low-resource settings.
+### Data-Centric AI and Benchmarks
 
-Individual contributors and creators are credited in the documentation of their respective projects.
+- **Localized Text-to-SQL:** Developing datasets and evaluation methods for translating locally relevant natural-language queries into executable SQL.
+- **Cameroonian Document AI:** Exploring datasets and benchmarks for document understanding, optical character recognition (OCR), and related visual-language tasks.
 
-**Founder & Lead Architect:** [**Tiani Pekins Ebika**](https://tianipekins.com)
+These projects represent our research directions. Individual project repositories provide their current scope, release status, documentation, and licensing terms.
+
+## 🔬 Research Principles
+
+Our work prioritizes:
+
+- **Reproducibility:** Documenting data collection, processing, experimental settings, and evaluation procedures.
+- **Data Quality:** Using transparent annotation guidelines, validation procedures, and documented dataset limitations.
+- **Responsible Research:** Respecting participant consent, privacy, cultural context, intellectual property, and applicable ethical requirements.
+- **Transparent Attribution:** Documenting the roles of dataset creators, annotators, speakers, reviewers, and other contributors where appropriate.
+- **Honest Reporting:** Distinguishing established findings from exploratory results and clearly stating the limitations of our resources.
+
+
+## ⚖️ Licensing and Data Use
+
+LAB 237 supports open and reproducible research. However, **licensing is determined at the level of each repository and resource**.
+
+- Software and code may be released under the Apache License 2.0 where explicitly specified.
+- Datasets, audio recordings, annotations, models, and documentation may have different licenses or access conditions depending on their content, permissions, consent requirements, and intended use.
+- The license and terms stated in an individual repository take precedence over this general overview.
+- Public availability does not automatically mean that every resource may be redistributed or used commercially.
+
+Please consult each project's documentation before using, modifying, or redistributing its materials.
+
+## 🤝 Collaborate with LAB 237
+
+We welcome collaboration from researchers, lecturers, students, engineers, computational linguists, data scientists, and members of language communities interested in building responsible AI resources for Cameroon and other low-resource settings.
+
+Contributions may include:
+
+- Research design and literature review
+- Data collection and language documentation
+- Speech recording and transcription
+- Data annotation and quality validation
+- Software and model development
+- Evaluation, documentation, and reproducibility checks
+  
+Participation arrangements, consent requirements, compensation, and expected forms of credit should be communicated clearly for each project.
+
+
+## 👤 Leadership and Contact
+
+**Founder & Lead Architect:** [Tiani Pekins Ebika](https://tianipekins.com)
 
 **Affiliation:** Department of Computer Engineering, University of Buea, Cameroon.
 
-**Contact:** [**tiani@tianipekins.com**](mailto:tiani@tianipekins.com)
+**Email:** [tiani@tianipekins.com](mailto:tiani@tianipekins.com)
+
+**GitHub:** [github.com/cameroon-ai-lab](https://github.com/cameroon-ai-lab)
+
+Explore our repositories for project documentation, datasets, code, training scripts, and evaluation pipelines.
+
+---
 
-Find our codebase, training scripts, and evaluation pipelines on [**GitHub**](https://github.com/cameroon-ai-lab).
+*LAB 237 — Building open, reproducible, and locally grounded AI research resources for Cameroon.*