# Yankari: A Monolingual Yoruba Dataset

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.03334 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03334/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 12 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Dec 2024.

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

- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [CulturaX: A Cleaned, Enormous, and Multilingual Dataset for Large Language Models in 167 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09400/) (2023)
- [Scaling Laws and Interpretability of Learning from Repeated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10487/) (2022)
- [A Monolingual Approach to Contextualized Word Embeddings for Mid-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06202/) (2020)
- [Massive vs. Curated Word Embeddings for Low-Resourced Languages. The Case of Yor`ub'a and Twi](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02481/) (2019)
- [Cheetah: Natural Language Generation for 517 African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01053/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents Yankari, a large-scale monolingual dataset for the Yoruba language, aimed at addressing the critical gap in Natural Language Processing (NLP) resources for this important West African language. Despite being spoken by over 30 million people, Yoruba has been severely underrepresented in NLP research and applications. We detail our methodology for creating this dataset, which includes careful source selection, automated quality control, and rigorous data cleaning processes. The Yankari dataset comprises 51,407 documents from 13 diverse sources, totaling over 30 million tokens. Our approach focuses on ethical data collection practices, avoiding problematic sources and addressing issues prevalent in existing datasets. We provide thorough automated evaluations of the dataset, demonstrating its quality compared to existing resources. The Yankari dataset represents a significant advancement in Yoruba language resources, providing a foundation for developing more accurate NLP models, supporting comparative linguistic studies, and contributing to the digital accessibility of the Yoruba language.