- Published on
TonalKeys: Diacritic Input and Morphology-Aware Emoji Search for African Languages on the Web and Mobile
- Authors
- Name
- Alfred Kondoro
- X
- Name
- Sharon Ibejih
- X
- Name
- Cynthia Amol
- X
Published at CIKM '26, Rome, Italy DOI: 10.1145/3799682.3840268
Abstract
Africa is home to more than 2,000 languages, yet support for these languages at the point of text input remains limited. Many African orthographies require diacritics and tone marks that standard keyboards do not provide, and emoji search in an African language finds little or nothing because the keyword data in Unicode CLDR remains uneven or absent. We demonstrate TonalKeys, a live input system that closes both gaps with two front-ends sharing one retrieval core. A publicly released Chrome extension works anywhere on the web, including canvas applications such as Google Docs where direct insertion is blocked, and a working Android keyboard prototype serves mobile-first settings. TonalKeys offers curated character entry for 18 languages across five regions and a morphology- and code-mix-aware emoji search that currently covers Swahili, with further languages planned. A hybrid stemmer pairs a lexicon derived from an existing Swahili verb-conjugation.