Datasets:

karim155
/

WolBanking77

license: cc-by-4.0
task_categories:
  - text-classification
  - automatic-speech-recognition
  - translation
language:
  - wo
  - fr
  - en
pretty_name: WolBanking77
size_categories:
  - 1K<n<10K
tags:
  - arxiv:2509.19271

Intent classification models have made a lot of progress in recent years. However, previous studies primarily focus on high-resource languages datasets, which results in a gap for low-resource languages and for regions with a high rate of illiterate people where languages are more spoken than read or written. This is the case in Senegal, for example, where Wolof is spoken by around 90% of the population, with an illiteracy rate of 42% for the country. Wolof is actually spoken by more than 10 million people in West African region.

To tackle such limitations, we release a Wolof Banking Speech Intent Classification Dataset (WolBanking77), for academic research in intent classification. WolBanking77 currently contains 9,791 text sentences in the banking domain and more than 4 hours of spoken sentences.

This dataset is suitable for :

Customer Intent Detection
Machine Translation in French & Wolof
Automatic Speech Recognition in Wolof
Comparing different machine learning models for Intent Classification

Dataset Content:

text dir - Contains text dataset
audio dir - Contains audio dataset
train.csv – Text Training dataset (includes label target)
test.csv – Text Test dataset (no label target)
train.parquet - Audio Training dataset
test.parquet - Audio Test dataset
questions.csv - Customer queries
responses.csv - Bot responses

Target Variable:

label→ The client intent

Features:

input – Client’s query in English (text)
input_fr – Client’s query in French (text)
input_wo – Client’s query in Wolof (text)
label – Client's Intent (categorical)

License

CC BY 4.0 – Open for public use.

Inspiration

Can you predict the client intent?
How well do different machine learning models perform on this classification task?

Citation

To cite this work, please use the following reference:

@inproceedings{
    kandji2025wolbanking,
    title={WolBanking77: Wolof Banking Speech Intent Classification Dataset},
    author={Abdou Karim KANDJI and Frederic Precioso and Cheikh BA and Samba NDIAYE and Augustin NDIONE},
    booktitle={The Thirty-ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems Datasets and Benchmarks Track},
    year={2025},
    url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=7k0JBDeHAv}
}

@misc{
    kandji2025wolbanking77wolofbankingspeech,
    title={WolBanking77: Wolof Banking Speech Intent Classification Dataset}, 
    author={Abdou Karim Kandji and Frédéric Precioso and Cheikh Ba and Samba Ndiaye and Augustin Ndione},
    year={2025},
    eprint={2509.19271},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    primaryClass={cs.CL},
    url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19271}, 
}