configs:
- config_name: corpus
data_files:
- split: train
path:
- corpus/fr_dje.jsonl
- config_name: glossary
data_files:
- split: train
path:
- glossary/glossary.csv
- config_name: monolingual_zarma
data_files:
- split: train
path:
- monolingual/monolingual_zarma.jsonl
license: cc-by-nc-4.0
task_categories:
- text-classification
- zero-shot-classification
- translation
- token-classification
- fill-mask
Feriji: A French-Zarma Parallel Corpus, Glossary & Translator
This dataset repository contains Feriji, the first robust French-Zarma parallel corpus and glossary designed for machine translation (MT), as introduced in the paper "Feriji: A French-Zarma Parallel Corpus, Glossary & Translator" published at ACL 2024 (Student Research Workshop). Zarma, a dialect of Songhay within the Nilo-Saharan language family, is spoken by over 5 million people across Niger and neighboring countries. Feriji addresses the critical need for linguistic resources for this underrepresented African language.
Dataset Overview
The Feriji dataset includes three components:
- French-Zarma Parallel Corpus: Located in
corpus/fr_dje.csv, this contains 61,085 sentences in Zarma and 42,789 in French, forming a robust aligned corpus for MT. - French-Zarma Glossary: Found in
glossary/glossary.csv, this includes 4,062 word pairs, serving as a lexical resource. - Monolingual Zarma Text: Stored in
monolingual/monolingual_zarma.txt, this provides additional Zarma-only text for language modeling or analysis.
These resources were used to fine-tune three large language models, achieving a BLEU score of 30.06 on the best-performing model, with further evaluation based on human judgments of fluency, comprehension, and readability.
Repository Structure
corpus/fr_dje.csv: Aligned French-Zarma sentence pairs.glossary/glossary.csv: French-Zarma word glossary.monolingual/monolingual_zarma.txt: Monolingual Zarma text.
Acknowledgments
We gratefully acknowledge the Computer Science Department of Ashesi University for funding the annotation of the Feriji project.
Paper Details
For full details on the creation, evaluation, and impact of Feriji, see the original paper: - Link: https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-srw.1/ - Citation:
@misc{keita2024ferijifrenchzarmaparallelcorpus,
title={Feriji: A French-Zarma Parallel Corpus, Glossary & Translator},
author={Mamadou K. Keita and Elysabhete Amadou Ibrahim and Habibatou Abdoulaye Alfari and Christopher Homan},
year={2024},
eprint={2406.05888},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.05888},
}