The problem

Across Nigerian apps — preventive safety, ride-hailing, last-mile logistics, journalism, humanitarian response — the place names that matter most are not in any gazetteer.

Input:   "trouble for Berger this morning, dem don block road"
Want:    [{name: "Berger Junction", lat: 6.5841, lng: 3.3790, confidence: 0.91}]

Existing geoparsers (Mordecai 3, Edinburgh Geoparser, Nominatim) collapse on Nigerian vernacular geography. They rely on GeoNames, which is sparse below the LGA level and has zero entries for under-bridges, junctions, last bus stops, behind-landmark references, or named markets.

SafeSignal-Geo is the first open library to treat informal Nigerian geolocation as the primary problem, not an edge case.

What you get

• safesignal-geo — a Python package: pip install safesignal-geo. Ships today with a 41K-row Nigerian gazetteer, BM25 resolver, and a context-aware reranker (Top-1 0.93, P95 65 ms on CPU).
• safesignal-geo-base — a ~270M-parameter AfroXLMR + LoRA span tagger. Trained on the v0.2 corpus (partial F1 0.749 on v0.2 dev gold); weights publishing to Hugging Face in v0.2.0.
• safesignal-geo-gazetteer — the bundled Nigerian gazetteer, CC-BY 4.0. v0.2 is a 42,315-row national extract with an OSM-mined informal-place index (junctions, bus stops, motor parks, markets) for Lagos / FCT / Rivers / Kano.
• A public eval leaderboard — planned for v1.0; submit your own model, see how it ranks.

Quickstart

pip install safesignal-geo

from safesignal_geo import Geo

geo = Geo()  # bundled v0.2 Nigerian gazetteer (~42k records)

for hit in geo.resolve("Traffic don jam for Ojuelegba this morning."):
    print(hit.canonical_name, hit.admin_state, hit.admin_lga, hit.lat, hit.lng)

# Ojuelegba Lagos Surulere 6.5093742 3.3665407

Or from the command line:

safesignal-geo resolve "incident at Computer Village, Lagos"
safesignal-geo resolve --span "Bauchi" --context "today in Bauchi state"

The library bundles the gazetteer, BM25 resolver, and a context-aware reranker that uses Nigerian-state priors and co-mention signals. The fine-tuned span tagger is an optional [tagger] extra; weights publish to Hugging Face in v0.2.0.

Status

Pre-alpha. Project started May 2026. Target v1.0: August 2026.

v0.2 numbers vs. spec

Reproducibility commands and full slice breakdowns: docs/benchmarks/v0.2.md. Design doc: docs/design-doc.md.

How to contribute

You don't need to be an ML engineer. The single most valuable thing you can do is add 10 places from your neighborhood to the gazetteer. That takes 30 minutes and meaningfully moves v1.0 forward.

1. Add a place — open an issue with the Add a place template, or submit a PR to gazetteer/contributions/.
2. Annotate text — once the Label Studio instance is live (Month 1), pick up annotation tasks.
3. Flag an error — wrong coordinates? duplicate? missing alias? File an issue with Flag an error.
4. Code & model contributions — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

All contributions are credited in the dataset's per-row source field.

Coverage

v0.2 (bundled): Nigeria-wide gazetteer (42,315 rows). Per-state informal-place counts in the four priority cities:

v1.0 (August 2026): grow informal-place rows via Nominatim retries and community contributions; OSM PBF mining was largely exhausted in v0.2.

v1.1+: Ibadan, Benin City, Onitsha, Aba, Enugu, Kaduna. Native Yoruba/Hausa/Igbo support with Masakhane collaboration. Learned cross-encoder reranker.

Scope: what this is not

• Not a routing engine.
• Not reverse geocoding (lat/lng → name).
• Not a safety / incident / crime model. SafeSignal-Geo is only geolocation. Domain logic lives downstream.
• Not trained on ACLED data (their EULA prohibits ML training).
• Not used for security-force tracking. The library does not include surveillance categories.

License stack

OpenRAIL-M restricts use of the weights for surveillance, military, and discriminatory applications. We chose this deliberately given Nigeria's surveillance context.

Acknowledgements

SafeSignal-Geo is incubated by Jyv Tech LLC and built around Chipon's preventive-safety platform as the anchor user. We build on top of:

• AfroXLMR — Adelani et al., 2022
• MasakhaNER — Adelani et al., 2021 (evaluation only)
• OpenStreetMap Nigeria contributors (ODbL)
• The Masakhane, Data Science Nigeria, and AfricaNLP communities

Citation

@software{safesignal_geo_2026,
  author  = {Tanta, Abraham Esandayinze},
  title   = {SafeSignal-Geo: An Open-Source Geolocation Library for Informal Nigerian Place Names},
  year    = {2026},
  url     = {https://github.com/mr-tanta/safesignal-geo},
  organization = {Jyv Tech LLC}
}

Contact

• Maintainer: Abraham Esandayinze Tanta · abraham@jyvtechllc.com
• Issues: github.com/mr-tanta/safesignal-geo/issues
• Discussions: github.com/mr-tanta/safesignal-geo/discussions