# BIG-C: a Multimodal Multi-Purpose Dataset for Bemba

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17202 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17202/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Books](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06724/) (2015)
- [The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09095/) (2020)
- [XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09296/) (2021)
- [MLS: A Large-Scale Multilingual Dataset for Speech Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03411/) (2020)
- [VoxPopuli: A Large-Scale Multilingual Speech Corpus for Representation Learning, Semi-Supervised Learning and Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00390/) (2021)
- [AdapterHub: A Framework for Adapting Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07779/) (2020)
- [Visual Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08669/) (2016)
- [Pixel-BERT: Aligning Image Pixels with Text by Deep Multi-Modal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00849/) (2020)
- [WIT: Wikipedia-based Image Text Dataset for Multimodal Multilingual Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01913/) (2021)
- [BABEL: Bodies, Action and Behavior with English Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09696/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Zambezi Voice: A Multilingual Speech Corpus for Zambian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04428/) (2023)
- [Charting the Landscape of African NLP: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Ahead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21315/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Multi-modal Machine Translation: Tasks, Methods and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12669/) (2024)
- [Large Multimodal Models for Low-Resource Languages: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05568/) (2025)
- [How to Evaluate Speech Translation with Source-Aware Neural MT Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03295/) (2025)
- [Bemba Speech Translation: Exploring a Low-Resource African Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02518/) (2025)
- [GMU Systems for the IWSLT 2025 Low-Resource Speech Translation Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21781/) (2025)
- [Scalable Multilingual Multimodal Machine Translation with Speech-Text Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21646/) (2026)
- [Automated Gradient-Driven Parameter Sharing for Low-Resource Multilingual Speech-to-Text Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25836/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present BIG-C (Bemba Image Grounded Conversations), a large multimodal dataset for Bemba. While Bemba is the most populous language of Zambia, it exhibits a dearth of resources which render the development of language technologies or language processing research almost impossible. The dataset is comprised of multi-turn dialogues between Bemba speakers based on images, transcribed and translated into English. There are more than 92,000 utterances/sentences, amounting to more than 180 hours of audio data with corresponding transcriptions and English translations. We also provide baselines on speech recognition (ASR), machine translation (MT) and speech translation (ST) tasks, and sketch out other potential future multimodal uses of our dataset. We hope that by making the dataset available to the research community, this work will foster research and encourage collaboration across the language, speech, and vision communities especially for languages outside the "traditionally" used high-resourced ones. All data and code are publicly available: https://github.com/csikasote/bigc.