# TaTa: A Multilingual Table-to-Text Dataset for African Languages

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.00142 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00142/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08239/) (2022)
- [BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04696/) (2020)
- [Quantifying Memorization Across Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07646/) (2022)
- [XL-Sum: Large-Scale Multilingual Abstractive Summarization for 44 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13822/) (2021)
- [XCOPA: A Multilingual Dataset for Causal Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00333/) (2020)
- [ToTTo: A Controlled Table-To-Text Generation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14373/) (2020)
- [Measuring Attribution in Natural Language Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12870/) (2021)
- [The E2E Dataset: New Challenges For End-to-End Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.09254/) (2017)
- [Challenges in Data-to-Document Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08052/) (2017)
- [Chart-to-Text: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Chart Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06486/) (2022)
- [XTREME-R: Towards More Challenging and Nuanced Multilingual Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07412/) (2021)
- [Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02353/) (2020)
- [MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11811/) (2021)
- [Repairing the Cracked Foundation: A Survey of Obstacles in Evaluation Practices for Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06935/) (2022)
- [DART: Open-Domain Structured Data Record to Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02871/) (2020)
- [Handling Divergent Reference Texts when Evaluating Table-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01081/) (2019)
- [A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way! Leveraging Pre-trained Models for African News Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02022/) (2022)
- [Learning Compact Metrics for MT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06341/) (2021)
- [Controlled Hallucinations: Learning to Generate Faithfully from Noisy Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05873/) (2020)
- [Chart-to-Text: Generating Natural Language Descriptions for Charts by Adapting the Transformer Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09142/) (2020)
- [Language ID in the Wild: Unexpected Challenges on the Path to a Thousand-Language Web Text Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14571/) (2020)
- [SciCap: Generating Captions for Scientific Figures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11624/) (2021)
- [Semantic Noise Matters for Neural Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03905/) (2019)
- [NaijaSenti: A Nigerian Twitter Sentiment Corpus for Multilingual Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08277/) (2022)
- [Towards Afrocentric NLP for African Languages: Where We Are and Where We Can Go](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08351/) (2022)
- [Data-to-text Generation with Macro Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02723/) (2021)
- [Massive vs. Curated Word Embeddings for Low-Resourced Languages. The Case of Yor`ub'a and Twi](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02481/) (2019)
- [AfroMT: Pretraining Strategies and Reproducible Benchmarks for Translation of 8 African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04715/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [DePlot: One-shot visual language reasoning by plot-to-table translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10505/) (2022)
- [Evaluating the Elementary Multilingual Capabilities of Large Language Models with MultiQ](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03814/) (2024)
- [AfriQA: Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering for African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06897/) (2023)
- [Chart-based Reasoning: Transferring Capabilities from LLMs to VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12596/) (2024)
- [Charting the Landscape of African NLP: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Ahead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21315/) (2025)
- [Faithful Chart Summarization with ChaTS-Pi](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19094/) (2024)
- [Triples-to-isiXhosa (T2X): Addressing the Challenges of Low-Resource Agglutinative Data-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07567/) (2024)
- [M3TQA: Massively Multilingual Multitask Table Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16265/) (2025)
- [Bridging Gaps in Natural Language Processing for Yor`ub'a: A Systematic Review of a Decade of Progress and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17364/) (2025)
- [TabuLM: Morphology-Aware Tabular Pre-training for Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26923/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing data-to-text generation datasets are mostly limited to English. To address this lack of data, we create Table-to-Text in African languages (TaTa), the first large multilingual table-to-text dataset with a focus on African languages. We created TaTa by transcribing figures and accompanying text in bilingual reports by the Demographic and Health Surveys Program, followed by professional translation to make the dataset fully parallel. TaTa includes 8,700 examples in nine languages including four African languages (Hausa, Igbo, Swahili, and Yor`ub'a) and a zero-shot test language (Russian). We additionally release screenshots of the original figures for future research on multilingual multi-modal approaches. Through an in-depth human evaluation, we show that TaTa is challenging for current models and that less than half the outputs from an mT5-XXL-based model are understandable and attributable to the source data. We further demonstrate that existing metrics perform poorly for TaTa and introduce learned metrics that achieve a high correlation with human judgments. We release all data and annotations at https://github.com/google-research/url-nlp.