# NaijaRC: A Multi-choice Reading Comprehension Dataset for Nigerian Languages

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.09768 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09768/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [RACE: Large-scale ReAding Comprehension Dataset From Examinations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04683/) (2017)
- [The NarrativeQA Reading Comprehension Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07040/) (2017)
- [Adapting Pre-trained Language Models to African Languages via Multilingual Adaptive Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06487/) (2022)
- [XOR QA: Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11856/) (2020)
- [A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way! Leveraging Pre-trained Models for African News Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02022/) (2022)
- [Transfer Learning and Distant Supervision for Multilingual Transformer Models: A Study on African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03179/) (2020)
- [SERENGETI: Massively Multilingual Language Models for Africa](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10785/) (2022)
- [KINNEWS and KIRNEWS: Benchmarking Cross-Lingual Text Classification for Kinyarwanda and Kirundi](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12174/) (2020)
- [MasakhaNEWS: News Topic Classification for African languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09972/) (2023)
- [AfroMT: Pretraining Strategies and Reproducible Benchmarks for Translation of 8 African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04715/) (2021)
- [AfriQA: Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering for African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06897/) (2023)
- [MasakhaPOS: Part-of-Speech Tagging for Typologically Diverse African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13989/) (2023)
- [Embracing data abundance: BookTest Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.00956/) (2016)
- [VNHSGE: VietNamese High School Graduation Examination Dataset for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12199/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [AfroBench: How Good are Large Language Models on African Languages?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07978/) (2023)
- [Charting the Landscape of African NLP: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Ahead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21315/) (2025)
- [Y-NQ: English-Yor`ub'a Evaluation dataset for Open-Book Reading Comprehension and Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08279/) (2024)
- [NaijaNLP: A Survey of Nigerian Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19784/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we create NaijaRC: a new multi-choice Reading Comprehension dataset for three native Nigeria languages that is based on high-school reading comprehension examination. We provide baseline results by performing cross-lingual transfer using existing English RACE and Belebele training dataset based on a pre-trained encoder-only model. Additionally, we provide results by prompting large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4.