ghananlpcommunity/pristine-twi-english

Pristine Twi–English Parallel Dataset

A large-scale Twi ↔ English parallel dataset derived from the Pristine Twi Dataset by the Ghana NLP Community.

The Twi source texts span four distinct styles — Monologue, Narrative, Dialogue, and Storyful — grounded in real Ghanaian news topics to capture authentic vocabulary and named entities. Each Twi passage has been translated into fluent English using a batch translation pipeline powered by the Gemini API.

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Dataset Details

Field	Detail
Languages	Twi (tw) → English (en)
License	CC BY 4.0
Author	Mich-Seth Owusu
Organisation	Ghana NLP Community
Source dataset	ghananlpcommunity/pristine-twi
Translation model	Gemini API (batch + one-by-one fallback)
Format	Parquet

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Columns

Column	Type	Description
twi	string	Original Twi source text
style	string	Text style: Monologue, Narrative, Dialogue, Storyful
english_translation	string	Fluent English translation of the Twi text

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Text Styles

The dataset preserves the four styles from the original Pristine Twi corpus:

• Monologue (ɔkasafoɔ biako) — passionate first-person perspective
• Narrative (abakɔsɛm) — journalistic, structured account
• Dialogue (nkɔmmɔdie) — conversational exchange between speakers
• Storyful (anansesɛm) — dramatic, metaphorical storytelling

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How the Translations Were Generated

Translations were produced using the Gemini API with a two-stage pipeline:

1. Batch translation — texts were grouped into batches of 30 and sent to the model in a single prompt, separated by a --- delimiter.
2. One-by-one fallback — if the model's response could not be parsed into the expected number of translations, each text in the batch was retried individually.

Resume support was built in: already-translated rows were detected from the output file and skipped, allowing the pipeline to be safely interrupted and restarted.

The translation code is available at: GhanaNLP/NLP-scripts

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Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("ghananlpcommunity/pristine-twi-english")
print(ds["train"][0])

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Intended Uses

• Twi ↔ English machine translation training and evaluation
• Low-resource NLP benchmarking for Akan/Twi
• Cross-lingual transfer learning
• Building Twi tokenisers and language models with aligned English supervision

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Limitations & Biases

• Translations were generated by a large language model and have not been manually verified by native Twi speakers. Some translations may contain errors, especially for idiomatic or culturally specific phrases.
• Source texts were synthetically generated from Ghanaian news topics, so the domain coverage, while broad, may not represent all registers of spoken Twi.
• The dataset skews toward written, formal Twi and may under-represent colloquial or dialectal variation across Akan sub-groups (Asante Twi, Akuapem Twi, Fante, etc.).

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Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite the original Pristine Twi dataset and acknowledge the Ghana NLP Community:

@dataset{owusu2024pristinetwieng,
  author    = {Owusu, Mich-Seth and Ghana NLP Community},
  title     = {Pristine Twi–English Parallel Dataset},
  year      = {2024},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  url       = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/ghananlpcommunity/pristine-twi-english}
}

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Made with ❤️ by Mich-Seth Owusu for the Ghana NLP Community.