Datasets:

African-Languages-Lab
/

multi-open

license: other
language:
  - en
  - am
  - ff
  - yo
  - ig
  - om
  - sw
  - ha
  - tw
  - sn
  - rw
  - ee
  - bm
  - wo
  - lg
  - ar
  - so
  - af
  - ti
  - mg
  - xh
  - zu
  - st
  - ny
  - ln
  - tn
  - fon
  - ki
  - lua
  - mos
  - kg
  - bem
task_categories:
  - translation
tags:
  - african-languages
  - machine-translation
  - low-resource-languages
  - arxiv:2510.05644
pretty_name: African Languages Lab Multi-Open
configs:
  - config_name: english-amharic
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-amharic/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-fula
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-fula/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-yoruba
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-yoruba/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-igbo
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-igbo/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-oromo
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-oromo/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-swahili
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-swahili/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-hausa
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-hausa/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-twi
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-twi/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-shona
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-shona/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-kinyarwanda
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-kinyarwanda/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-ewe
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-ewe/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-bambara
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-bambara/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-wolof
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-wolof/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-luganda
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-luganda/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-arabic
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-arabic/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-somali
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-somali/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-afrikaans
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-afrikaans/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-tigrinya
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-tigrinya/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-malagasy
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-malagasy/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-xhosa
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-xhosa/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-zulu
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-zulu/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-southern sotho
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-southern_sotho/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-chewa
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-chewa/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-lingala
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-lingala/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-tswana
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-tswana/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-fon
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-fon/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-kikuyu
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-kikuyu/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-tshiluba
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-tshiluba/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-mossi
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-mossi/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-kikongo
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-kikongo/train-*.parquet
  - config_name: english-bemba
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/english-bemba/train-*.parquet

African Languages Lab Multi-Open

multi-open is the open-source multilingual subset released by the African Languages Lab. It contains English-target parallel text for 31 African languages.

Project website: https://the-african-languages-lab.github.io/

The African Languages Lab: A Collaborative Approach to Advancing Low-Resource African NLP
Issaka et al., ACL 2026.

The paper presents All Lab's broader collaborative program: systematic and quality-controlled data infrastructure, empirical evaluation for low-resource African NLP, and local research capacity building. It reports a broader multimodal collection spanning 40 languages and evaluates translation across 31 languages. The full dataset is not released here. The complete paper corpus is access-restricted and requires a license for full release.

ACL 2026 oral presentation

This work is presented as an oral paper at ACL 2026 (San Diego). The conference poster:

Data format

Each configuration is a separate English-target parallel dataset. Text and token-count column names follow the language pair (for example, english, swahili, english_token_count, and swahili_token_count).

Token counts

Token counts per language pair (source and target *_token_count columns).

Language pair	Number of rows	English tokens	Target tokens	Combined tokens
english-arabic	9,999,986	289,643,600	405,315,900	694,959,500
english-amharic	5,000,002	78,282,582	87,467,465	165,750,047
english-afrikaans	5,000,006	72,617,092	78,248,827	150,865,919
english-swahili	3,000,001	45,619,235	50,012,735	95,631,970
english-yoruba	850,000	26,153,024	40,944,851	67,097,875
english-xhosa	800,001	11,898,318	13,318,543	25,216,861
english-somali	599,999	8,938,590	14,680,753	23,619,343
english-hausa	449,997	10,440,301	11,727,876	22,168,177
english-igbo	350,002	8,301,596	10,741,795	19,043,391
english-kinyarwanda	500,001	7,140,011	8,916,183	16,056,194
english-malagasy	420,000	6,576,333	8,406,495	14,982,828
english-tigrinya	420,000	6,049,701	7,557,984	13,607,685
english-luganda	300,000	5,745,054	7,436,919	13,181,973
english-oromo	410,000	4,499,080	6,899,616	11,398,696
english-kikuyu	380,000	4,747,061	6,394,913	11,141,974
english-wolof	400,000	4,896,950	5,607,835	10,504,785
english-tshiluba	400,000	4,478,381	5,769,974	10,248,355
english-zulu	300,000	4,518,161	5,230,191	9,748,352
english-fon	270,000	3,738,341	5,973,240	9,711,581
english-fula	300,000	4,224,575	5,278,610	9,503,185
english-lingala	390,000	4,384,898	4,812,085	9,196,983
english-shona	300,000	4,196,647	4,779,603	8,976,250
english-southern_sotho	300,000	3,815,716	4,863,376	8,679,092
english-chewa	250,000	4,010,771	4,472,410	8,483,181
english-twi	300,000	3,701,483	4,249,403	7,950,886
english-mossi	300,000	3,372,164	4,410,104	7,782,268
english-kikongo	330,000	3,420,676	4,138,205	7,558,881
english-tswana	300,000	2,977,328	3,739,706	6,717,034
english-bemba	250,000	2,737,222	3,414,609	6,151,831
english-bambara	100,000	1,307,668	1,753,615	3,061,283
english-ewe	52,478	1,346,840	1,611,353	2,958,193
Total	33,022,473	643,779,399	828,175,174	1,471,954,573

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

dataset = load_dataset("African-Languages-Lab/multi-open", "english-swahili")

Citation

@inproceedings{issaka-etal-2026-african,
  title = "The {A}frican Languages Lab: A Collaborative Approach to Advancing Low-Resource {A}frican {NLP}",
  author = "Issaka, Sheriff and Wang, Keyi and Ajibola, Yinka and Samuel-Ipaye, Oluwatumininu and Zhang, Zhaoyi and Jimenez, Nicte Aguillon and Agyei, Evans Kofi and Lin, Abraham and Ramachandran, Rohan and Mumin, Sadick Abdul and Nchifor, Faith and Issah, Mohammed Shuraim and Gonzalez, Erick Rosas and Liu, Lieqi and Kpei, Sylvester and Osei, Jemimah Kusi and Ajeneza, Carlene and Boateng, Persis and Yeboah, Prisca Adwoa Dufie and Gabriel, Saadia",
  booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
  month = jul,
  year = "2026",
  publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
  url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1965/",
  pages = "42460--42477"
}

Note on translation_quality_score

translation_quality_score is an automatic 1–10 translation-quality score from a Gemma judge (google/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it), for filtering/analysis only — not human gold labels. Null values mean the judge output could not be parsed.