# KINNEWS and KIRNEWS: Benchmarking Cross-Lingual Text Classification for Kinyarwanda and Kirundi

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.12174 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12174/

## Key facts

- Cited by 31 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 31)

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- [SIB-200: A Simple, Inclusive, and Big Evaluation Dataset for Topic Classification in 200+ Languages and Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07445/) (2023)
- [Adapting Pre-trained Language Models to African Languages via Multilingual Adaptive Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06487/) (2022)
- [A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way! Leveraging Pre-trained Models for African News Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02022/) (2022)
- [AfroLM: A Self-Active Learning-based Multilingual Pretrained Language Model for 23 African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03263/) (2022)
- [SERENGETI: Massively Multilingual Language Models for Africa](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10785/) (2022)
- [XTREME-UP: A User-Centric Scarce-Data Benchmark for Under-Represented Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11938/) (2023)
- [MasakhaNEWS: News Topic Classification for African languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09972/) (2023)
- [LLM-Prop: Predicting Physical And Electronic Properties Of Crystalline Solids From Their Text Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14029/) (2023)
- [KinyaBERT: a Morphology-aware Kinyarwanda Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08459/) (2022)
- [MasakhaPOS: Part-of-Speech Tagging for Typologically Diverse African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13989/) (2023)
- [SemRel2024: A Collection of Semantic Textual Relatedness Datasets for 13 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08638/) (2024)
- [Charting the Landscape of African NLP: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Ahead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21315/) (2025)
- [The Zeno's Paradox of `Low-Resource' Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20817/) (2024)
- [MMTAfrica: Multilingual Machine Translation for African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04306/) (2022)
- [Multilingual Open Text Release 1: Public Domain News in 44 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05609/) (2022)
- [Where Are We? Evaluating LLM Performance on African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19582/) (2025)
- [Kencorpus: A Kenyan Language Corpus of Swahili, Dholuo and Luhya for Natural Language Processing Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12081/) (2022)
- [LR-Sum: Summarization for Less-Resourced Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09674/) (2022)
- [Cross-lingual transfer of multilingual models on low resource African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10965/) (2024)
- [NaijaRC: A Multi-choice Reading Comprehension Dataset for Nigerian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09768/) (2023)
- [The African Stopwords project: curating stopwords for African languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12155/) (2023)
- [AfriMTEB and AfriE5: Benchmarking and Adapting Text Embedding Models for African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23896/) (2025)
- [Izindaba-Tindzaba: Machine learning news categorisation for Long and Short Text for isiZulu and Siswati](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07426/) (2023)
- [Low-Resource Fast Text Classification Based on Intra-Class and Inter-Class Distance Calculation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09922/) (2024)
- [Text Categorization Can Enhance Domain-Agnostic Stopword Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13398/) (2024)
- [Few-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer for Prompting Large Language Models in Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06018/) (2024)
- [A Case Against Implicit Standards: Homophone Normalization in Machine Translation for Languages that use the Ge'ez Script](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15142/) (2025)
- [Graph Convolutional Network for Swahili News Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09325/) (2021)
- [Dataset of News Articles with Provenance Metadata for Media Relevance Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09847/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent progress in text classification has been focused on high-resource languages such as English and Chinese. For low-resource languages, amongst them most African languages, the lack of well-annotated data and effective preprocessing, is hindering the progress and the transfer of successful methods. In this paper, we introduce two news datasets (KINNEWS and KIRNEWS) for multi-class classification of news articles in Kinyarwanda and Kirundi, two low-resource African languages. The two languages are mutually intelligible, but while Kinyarwanda has been studied in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to some extent, this work constitutes the first study on Kirundi. Along with the datasets, we provide statistics, guidelines for preprocessing, and monolingual and cross-lingual baseline models. Our experiments show that training embeddings on the relatively higher-resourced Kinyarwanda yields successful cross-lingual transfer to Kirundi. In addition, the design of the created datasets allows for a wider use in NLP beyond text classification in future studies, such as representation learning, cross-lingual learning with more distant languages, or as base for new annotations for tasks such as parsing, POS tagging, and NER. The datasets, stopwords, and pre-trained embeddings are publicly available at https://github.com/Andrews2017/KINNEWS-and-KIRNEWS-Corpus .