# The IgboAPI Dataset: Empowering Igbo Language Technologies through Multi-dialectal Enrichment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00997 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00997/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09095/) (2020)
- [Beyond English-Centric Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11125/) (2020)
- [A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way! Leveraging Pre-trained Models for African News Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02022/) (2022)
- [MasakhaPOS: Part-of-Speech Tagging for Typologically Diverse African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13989/) (2023)
- [Igbo-English Machine Translation: An Evaluation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00648/) (2020)
- [OkwuGb'e: End-to-End Speech Recognition for Fon and Igbo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07762/) (2021)
- [Towards Neural Machine Translation for African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05467/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Charting the Landscape of African NLP: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Ahead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21315/) (2025)
- [Saar-Voice: A Multi-Speaker Saarbr"ucken Dialect Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11803/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Igbo language is facing a risk of becoming endangered, as indicated by a 2025 UNESCO study. This highlights the need to develop language technologies for Igbo to foster communication, learning and preservation. To create robust, impactful, and widely adopted language technologies for Igbo, it is essential to incorporate the multi-dialectal nature of the language. The primary obstacle in achieving dialectal-aware language technologies is the lack of comprehensive dialectal datasets. In response, we present the IgboAPI dataset, a multi-dialectal Igbo-English dictionary dataset, developed with the aim of enhancing the representation of Igbo dialects. Furthermore, we illustrate the practicality of the IgboAPI dataset through two distinct studies: one focusing on Igbo semantic lexicon and the other on machine translation. In the semantic lexicon project, we successfully establish an initial Igbo semantic lexicon for the Igbo semantic tagger, while in the machine translation study, we demonstrate that by finetuning existing machine translation systems using the IgboAPI dataset, we significantly improve their ability to handle dialectal variations in sentences.