README.md

---
license: other
license_name: youversion-tos-derived
license_link: https://www.bible.com/terms
language:
- sus
- fr
- en
task_categories:
- translation
tags:
- susu
- soussou
- low-resource
- african-languages
- machine-translation
pretty_name: Susu (Soussou) Parallel and Monolingual Corpus
size_categories:
- 100K<n<1M
configs:
- config_name: sus-fr
  data_files:
  - split: train
    path: sus_fr_train.csv
  - split: validation
    path: sus_fr_dev.csv
  - split: test
    path: sus_fr_test.csv
- config_name: sus-en
  data_files:
  - split: train
    path: sus_en_train.csv
  - split: validation
    path: sus_en_dev.csv
  - split: test
    path: sus_en_test.csv
- config_name: monolingual
  data_files:
  - split: train
    path: sus_monolingual.csv
- config_name: lexicon
  data_files:
  - split: train
    path: lexicon.csv
---

# Susu (Soussou) Parallel and Monolingual Corpus

A multi-source corpus for **Susu** (Soussou; ISO 639-3 `sus`), a Mande language of
Guinea that is absent from NLLB-200 and from commercial MT systems. Built to train
[`2ADT-Consulting/nllb-susu-v2`](https://huggingface.co/2ADT-Consulting/nllb-susu-v2),
one of the first open neural MT systems for Susu.

## Configurations

| Config | Split | #rows | Columns |
|---|---|--:|---|
| `sus-fr` | train / validation / test | 114,503 / 1,000 / 1,000 | `sus`, `fr` |
| `sus-en` | train / validation / test | 111,013 / 991 / 992 | `sus`, `en` |
| `monolingual` | train | 28,724 | `sus` |
| `lexicon` | train | ~7,000 | `sus_officiel`, `sus_ortho_fr`, `fr`, ... |

```python
from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("2ADT-Consulting/susu-parallel", "sus-fr")
print(ds["test"][0])   # {'sus': '...', 'fr': '...'}
```

## Sources and construction

- **Bible translations** (Susu ↔ fr/en) aligned at verse level via verse keys,
  retrieved using the [Africa Corpus Builder](https://github.com/AfriSpeech/africa-corpus-builder)
  tool (AfriSpeech), which sources public Bible translations from
  [YouVersion](https://www.bible.com). This is the backbone of the parallel data.
- **Bilingual dictionary** (~7,000 Susu–French entries), including both the
  official orthography and a French-style spelling (`sus_ortho_fr`).
- **Everyday dialogues** extracted from a Peace-Corps Susu language-course manual,
  plus additional Christian-education booklets.
- **Orthography-aware augmentation**: informal "French-style" (SMS) variants of
  Susu sentences generated with deterministic rules
  (`x`→`kh`, `u`→`ou`, `ɛ`→`è`, `ɔ`→`o`, `ɲ`→`gn`, ...), so models learn to read
  informal input while producing the official orthography.

Pairs with an out-of-range source/target length ratio are filtered (211 removed
for sus–fr, 522 for sus–en). Vocabulary: 8,690 unique word types, 757,387 tokens.

## Intended use and limitations

- Intended for **machine translation** and low-resource NLP research on Susu.
- **Register bias**: the parallel data is dominated by biblical text; models and
  automatic metrics computed against these references over-reward the religious
  register. The everyday/dictionary/dialogue data partially mitigates this.
- **No native-speaker validation yet.** Automatic references may contain errors.

## License and citation

This dataset's text is **not** covered by NLLB-200's CC-BY-NC-4.0 license — that
license applies to the *model weights* we separately publish
([`nllb-susu-v2`](https://huggingface.co/2ADT-Consulting/nllb-susu-v2)), not to
this text. The Bible-derived portion originates from YouVersion and remains
subject to [YouVersion's terms of service](https://www.bible.com/terms),
independently of any model license; we retrieved it via the Africa Corpus
Builder tool and did not access YouVersion directly. The dictionary and
course-manual portions carry their own source terms. Review all applicable
terms before redistributing derived data.

If you use the Bible-derived portion, please also credit the tool used to
retrieve it:

```bibtex
@misc{africacorpusbuilder,
  title  = {{Africa Corpus Builder}: verse-aligned text for 693 African languages},
  author = {{AfriSpeech}},
  note   = {\url{https://github.com/AfriSpeech/africa-corpus-builder}},
  year   = {2026}
}
```

To cite this corpus itself:

```bibtex
@misc{susu-corpus,
  title  = {Susu (Soussou) Parallel and Monolingual Corpus},
  author = {TODO},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {\url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/2ADT-Consulting/susu-parallel}}
}
```