---
license: apache-2.0

language:
- ha
- so
- sw
- yo

task_categories:
- text-retrieval

mutilinguality:
- multilingual

viewer: true
---


# Dataset Summary

CIRAL is a collection for cross-lingual information retrieval research across four (4) African languages. The collection comprises English queries and query-passage relevance judgements for passages in the African languages.
This dataset repo contains only the queries and relevance judgements. The corpus collection can be found here [here](https://huggingface.co/datasets/CIRAL/ciral-corpus)


# Dataset Structure
1. To download the files: The queries can be found under `ciral-{lang}/topics` and are in `.tsv` formats with each line in the form:

   ```
    qid\tquery
   ```
   while the judgements are in the folder `ciral-{lang}/qrels`, with each file in the standard TREC format:

   ```
    qid Q0 docid relevance
   ```
2. To access the dataset via `datasets`:
   
   ```
   ciral_dataset = load_dataset("ciral/ciral", "hausa") #or swahili, somali, yoruba

   for data in ciral_dataset['dev']:  # or 'testA' or 'testB'
      query_id = data['query_id']
      query = data['query']
      pos_qrels = data['positive_passages']
      neg_qrels = data['negative_passages']

      # To load test set A's pool judgments
      pools_pos_qrels = data['pools_positive_passages']
      pools_neg_qrels = data['pools_negative_passages']

      for qrel in pos_qrels:
         docid = qrel['docid']
         text = qrel['text']
   ```



   
## Citation

```
@inproceedings{10.1145/3626772.3657884,
author = {Adeyemi, Mofetoluwa and Oladipo, Akintunde and Zhang, Xinyu and Alfonso-Hermelo, David and Rezagholizadeh, Mehdi and Chen, Boxing and Omotayo, Abdul-Hakeem and Abdulmumin, Idris and Etori, Naome A. and Musa, Toyib Babatunde and Fanijo, Samuel and Awoyomi, Oluwabusayo Olufunke and Salahudeen, Saheed Abdullahi and Mohammed, Labaran Adamu and Abolade, Daud Olamide and Lawan, Falalu Ibrahim and Sabo Abubakar, Maryam and Nasir Iro, Ruqayya and Imam Abubakar, Amina and Mohamed, Shafie Abdi and Mohamed, Hanad Mohamud and Ajayi, Tunde Oluwaseyi and Lin, Jimmy},
title = {CIRAL: A Test Collection for CLIR Evaluations in African Languages},
year = {2024},
isbn = {9798400704314},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3626772.3657884},
doi = {10.1145/3626772.3657884},
pages = {293–302},
numpages = {10},
keywords = {african languages, cross-lingual information retrieval},
location = {Washington DC, USA},
series = {SIGIR '24}
}
```