jamalinu/tarifit-verb-conjugations

🏔️ Tarifit Morphological Verb Dataset (TMVD)

📌 Overview

The Tarifit Morphological Verb Dataset (TMVD) is a high-quality, human-curated resource designed to bridge the gap in Digital Language Support for Tarifit (Riffian Berber), a severely underrepresented Afro-Asiatic language spoken by millions in the Rif region and the diaspora.

Unlike many large-scale datasets for low-resource languages that rely on noisy web-scraping or inaccurate machine translation, this dataset has been manually authored and validated by a native speaker with a background in linguistics and philology.

🧪 Research Value

This dataset provides a granular look at Tarifit verbal morphology, which is characterized by complex initial and internal changes. It is particularly valuable for:

• Instruction Tuning: Training LLMs to understand and generate grammatically correct Tarifit.
• Morphological Analysis: Evaluating the ability of models like Gemini, Llama, or Claude to handle non-concatenative morphology.
• Low-Resource Benchmarking: Serving as a "Gold Standard" for zero-shot or few-shot translation tasks involving Catalan and Spanish.

📊 Dataset Structure

The dataset contains structured conjugations for core verbs (including iri, aqqa, ttuga, gar, day), covering various tenses and moods:

• Preterite & Imperfective: Capturing the aspectual nuances of the Berber verb system.
• Future & Imperative: Including prohibitive and intensive forms.
• Deictic & Existential Verbs: Essential for building dialogue systems.

Column Metadata

Column	Description
verb_id	Citation form (Lemma).
translation	Semantic gloss in Spanish/Catalan.
pronoun	Subject pronoun (Independent form).
person/number/gender	Grammatical features for agreement verification.
tense/subtype	Morphosyntactic category.
form	The target conjugated form in Latin-based transcription.

🛠️ Applications

This project is part of an ongoing effort to create a Tarifit-Catalan Public Service Dialogue System, aimed at improving accessibility and linguistic inclusion.

📜 Citation & License

If you use this dataset in your research, please cite it as follows:

@dataset{tarifit_verb_conjugations_2025,
  author    = {Jamal I. (jamalinu)},
  title     = {Tarifit Morphological Verb Dataset},
  year      = {2025},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  url       = {[https://huggingface.co/datasets/jamalinu/tarifit-verb-conjugations](https://huggingface.co/datasets/jamalinu/tarifit-verb-conjugations)}
}