nileagi-suk
Collection
NileAGI Sukuma dataset and small STT, TTS, and MT models. • 4 items • Updated
Request access
Describe your intended use below. Downloads unlock after approval.
Weights are released under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 for non-commercial research and education. Credit NileAGI, keep adaptations under the same licence, and contact us before any commercial product or paid service. Do not use the model to harm people, break the law, or present outputs as human writing.
Log in or Sign Up to review the conditions and access this model content.
Sukuma MT
Authors: Zephania and Isack Odero
Swahili → Sukuma machine translation for the macron orthography (ā ē ī ō ū). Reads Swahili text and writes Sukuma text.
Direction is one-way. There is no English → Sukuma SKU — pivot English → Swahili first, then this model.
| Lite sibling | nileagi/nileagi-suk-mt-lite |
| Collection | nileagi/nileagi-suk |
Quick example
| Swahili | Sukuma (this model) |
|---|---|
| Habari yako? | Ūlī mhola? |
Always set the source language to swh_Latn and force the Sukuma BOS token suk_Latn. If you skip that, output will not be Sukuma.
Summary
| Task | Machine translation |
| Direction | Swahili → Sukuma |
| Language codes | swh_Latn → suk_Latn |
| Pairs | 31,102 · train 29,962 · val 993 · test 147 |
| Split rule | whole document groups |
| Orthography | Latin with vowel macrons |
| Primary metric | chrF2 |
Evaluation
Held-out document-group test (147 pairs) — the number to quote. Validation is a check only.
Sukuma is morphologically rich and longer than Swahili on this table (~1.3× words). Prefer chrF2; BLEU is secondary.
| Split | chrF2 | BLEU | eval loss |
|---|---|---|---|
| Test (147) | 42.6 | 20.0 | 1.97 |
| Validation (993) | 46.3 | 23.2 | — |
A chrF2 in the low–mid 40s means meaning is often carried but the text is not a clean match to the reference.
Lite on the same test split: chrF2 34.8, BLEU 12.7.
How to use
from transformers import AutoModelForSeq2SeqLM, AutoTokenizer
tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("nileagi/nileagi-suk-mt")
model = AutoModelForSeq2SeqLM.from_pretrained("nileagi/nileagi-suk-mt")
tok.src_lang = "swh_Latn"
inputs = tok("Habari yako?", return_tensors="pt")
bos = tok.convert_tokens_to_ids("suk_Latn")
out = model.generate(
**inputs,
forced_bos_token_id=bos,
max_new_tokens=128,
)
print(tok.decode(out[0], skip_special_tokens=True))
Decoded Sukuma sometimes contains spaces inside words. Keep real word boundaries when you display or score the text.
Intended use
- Literary and read-aloud Swahili → Sukuma
- Last hop of English → Swahili → Sukuma
Out of scope
- Sukuma → Swahili
- Direct English → Sukuma
- Chat, legal, medical, or news translation
- Conversational or social-media Sukuma
- Commercial products without a licence from NileAGI
Limitations
- Literary table and macron spelling only
- Decoding can insert extra spaces inside words; prefer chrF2 over BLEU
- Names and rare stems are often approximated
- English errors in a pivot cascade are copied into Sukuma
- Small held-out test (147 pairs)
Related
- Lite MT:
nileagi/nileagi-suk-mt-lite - STT:
nileagi/nileagi-suk-stt - TTS:
nileagi/nileagi-suk-tts
Access
Weights are gated under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
- Open Request access at the top of this page and describe your intended use.
- After approval, authenticate (
huggingface-cli loginorHF_TOKEN) and download or load the model.
Attribute NileAGI when you use or redistribute the weights. Adapted weights must stay under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Commercial licensing: hi@nileagi.com.
License
Weights: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
See LICENSE and NOTICE.md.
Citation
@misc{nileagi-suk-mt-2026,
title = {Sukuma machine translation (Swahili to Sukuma)},
author = {Zephania and Isack Odero},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {Hugging Face},
url = {https://huggingface.co/nileagi/nileagi-suk-mt},
note = {NileAGI}
}
- Downloads last month
- 126