---
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/](https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-srw.1/)
- **Citation**:
- 

```bibtex
@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}, 
}
```