silvanosolutions/xhosa-nlp-dataset

🇿🇦 Xhosa NLP Dataset

A high-quality, comprehensive isiXhosa (Xhosa) NLP training dataset carefully collected, cleaned, and packaged for training AI language models, translation systems, and other natural language processing applications.

📖 Introduction

isiXhosa is one of South Africa's 11 official languages, spoken by millions of people. However, like many African languages, it remains severely underrepresented in AI and machine learning training data.

xhosa-nlp-dataset is built to bridge this gap. This project aggregates high-quality text data from various sources—ranging from government documents and news articles to encyclopedic knowledge and general web text—processing them into standard, machine learning-ready formats.

Whether you are a machine learning researcher training the next big LLM, a startup building localized South African products, or a developer extending translation systems, this dataset provides a robust foundational resource for Xhosa NLP.

📊 Dataset Statistics

The dataset contains a total of 155,380 sentences, broadly categorized into monolingual (Xhosa-only) and parallel (Xhosa ↔ English) subsets.

The following table shows raw records collected per source before cleaning and deduplication.

Source	Type	Raw Records	Domains
OPUS-100 EN↔XH	Parallel	267,920	General web text
CC-100 / Glot500	Monolingual	50,000	General web text
Autshumato SA Gov	Parallel	44,442	Government and legal
Wikipedia isiXhosa	Monolingual	17,997	Encyclopedic knowledge
MasakhaNews	Monolingual	2,305	News articles
XhosaNavy (Stellenbosch University) ¹	Parallel	44,442	Government and legal
Total		382,664

Dataset after cleaning and deduplication. Raw collected records: 382,664. ¹ License pending verification — see Data Sources and Licenses for full details.

Breakdown by Type:

• Monolingual Data: 44,699 records
• Parallel Data: 110,681 records

Splits

Split	Records	Monolingual	Parallel
Train	124,303	35,759	88,544
Validation	15,537	4,469	11,068
Test	15,540	4,471	11,069

🧩 Data Formats

The dataset is packaged in clear, easy-to-use JSON Lines (JSONL) formats.

Monolingual Records

Xhosa-only texts primarily designed for pre-training and self-supervised learning.

{
  "id": "wiki_42_3",
  "text": "Umntu ngumntu ngabantu.",
  "source": "wikipedia_xh",
  "type": "monolingual",
  "domain": "general",
  "license": "CC-BY-SA"
}

Parallel Records

Aligned Xhosa and English sentence pairs, ideal for translation models and cross-lingual transfer learning.

{
  "id": "opus_12345",
  "xhosa": "Umntu ngumntu ngabantu.",
  "english": "A person is a person through other people.",
  "source": "opus100",
  "type": "parallel",
  "domain": "general",
  "license": "CC-BY"
}

🚀 Installation & Usage

You can load and use this dataset directly via the Hugging Face datasets library in Python.

First, ensure you have the required library installed:

pip install datasets

Then, load the dataset in your Python environment:

from datasets import load_dataset

# Load the monolingual dataset split
monolingual_ds = load_dataset("silvanosolutions/xhosa-nlp-dataset", "monolingual", split="train")
print(monolingual_ds[0])

# Load the parallel dataset split
parallel_ds = load_dataset("silvanosolutions/xhosa-nlp-dataset", "parallel", split="train")
print(parallel_ds[0])

🏗️ Project Structure

The underlying pipeline (Python 3.13) that collects, cleans, and builds this dataset is organized as follows:

.
├── scrapers/
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── utils.py               # Shared utilities: DIRS, HEADERS, log_section
│   ├── oscar_scraper.py       # SOURCE 1: CC-100/Glot500 monolingual
│   ├── mafand_scraper.py      # SOURCE 2: OPUS-100 parallel
│   ├── autshumato_scraper.py  # SOURCE 3: Autshumato government parallel
│   ├── wikipedia_scrapper.py  # SOURCE 4: isiXhosa Wikipedia
│   ├── government_scrapper.py # SOURCE 5: MasakhaNews
│   └── run_all.py             # Entry point to run all scrapers
├── cleaning/
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── utils.py
│   ├── language_verifier.py
│   ├── deduplicator.py
│   ├── domain_tagger.py
│   ├── packager.py
│   └── run_cleaning.py
└── data/
    ├── raw/                   # Raw collected data per source
    ├── cleaned/               # Deduplicated and quality-filtered data
    └── final/                 # Packaged dataset ready for HF upload

Libraries used in processing: datasets, beautifulsoup4, pandas, langdetect, ftfy, requests.

⚖️ Data Sources and Licenses

Because this dataset is an aggregation of several underlying corpora, the respective data points maintain their original licenses.

Dataset Source	Original License
Glot500	Apache-2.0
OPUS-100	CC-BY
Autshumato	CC-BY
Wikipedia	CC-BY-SA
MasakhaNews	CC-BY
XhosaNavy (Stellenbosch University)	⚠️ Pending verification

⚠️ XhosaNavy License Notice The XhosaNavy corpus was sourced from OPUS and originated from research at Stellenbosch University (Herman Engelbrecht, Dept. of E&E Engineering). OPUS explicitly states it does not own the source text and cannot guarantee redistribution rights. License confirmation for commercial redistribution is currently being sought from the original author. Commercial users should contact the maintainer before using records where source == "xhosanavey".

🎯 Intended Use Cases

This dataset is designed specifically for:

1. Language Modeling: Training or continuing pre-training of Xhosa language models.
2. Multilingual LLMs: Fine-tuning multilingual models (e.g., AfroXLMR, AfriBERTa) to improve Xhosa comprehension.
3. Machine Translation: Building high-fidelity Xhosa-English and English-Xhosa translation systems.
4. Sentiment Analysis: Training commercial sentiment classifiers and customer feedback analyzers in Xhosa.
5. Named Entity Recognition: Teaching systems to correctly identify entities in Xhosa text.
6. Commercial African Tech: Providing training data for products targeting Xhosa speakers in the South African and broader African markets.

🤝 How to Contribute

We welcome contributions from researchers and developers! If you have scripts for scraping additional Xhosa data, notice data quality issues, or want to contribute new parallel sets, please:

1. Fork the repository.
2. Set up your Python 3.13 environment.
3. Add or update scraper files inside the /scrapers directory using existing shared utilities.
4. Ensure text encoding fixes and language verification steps are applied.
5. Open a Pull Request detailing your additions or fixes.

📝 Citation

If you use this dataset in a research publication or project, please cite it using the following format:

@dataset{xhosa_nlp_dataset_2026,
  author       = {Ntsika Silvano},
  title        = {Xhosa NLP Dataset: A Comprehensive IsiXhosa Text Corpus},
  year         = {2026},
  version      = {1.0.0},
  publisher    = {Hugging Face},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/silvanosolutions/xhosa-nlp-dataset}},
}

(Please also ensure you cite the original source datasets: OPUS-100, MasakhaNews, Autshumato, Wikipedia, and Glot500 where applicable.)

📜 License

Code License

The aggregation and compilation code (/scrapers), utilities, and pipelines in this repository are licensed under the MIT License.

Data Licenses

The underlying processed data retains the original licenses of their respective sources as stated in the Data Sources and Licenses section.

Commercial Licensing

For commercial dataset access or alternative licensing agreements, please refer to the Contact section below.

📬 Contact & Maintainers

For licensing inquiries for commercial dataset applications, usage questions, or partnership opportunities, please reach out.

• Maintainer: Ntsika Silvano
• Issues: Please open a GitHub issue if you spot data anomalies or bugs.