---
dataset:
  name: Swahili News Classification Dataset
  version: 1.0.0
  description: ''
  source:
    type: collected
    format: text
    source_url: null
    license: custom
    languages:
    - Swahili
  task_categories:
  - text-classification
  tags:
  - news
  - swahili
  - east-africa
  - nlp
  - text-classification
  annotations_creators:
  - machine-generated
  - crowd-sourced
  language_creators:
  - found
  - crowdsourced
  language:
  - sw
  license: cc-by-4.0
  multilinguality:
  - monolingual
  dataset_info:
    features:
    - name: content
      dtype: string
    - name: category
      dtype: string
    - name: char_length
      dtype: int32
    num_rows: 24275
    splits:
    - name: train
      num_rows: 24275
    - name: test
      num_rows: 0
  citation: |
    @inproceedings{davis2020swahili,
        title = "Swahili: News Classification Dataset (0.2)",
        author = "Davis, David",
        year = "2020",
        publisher = "Zenodo",
        doi = "10.5281/zenodo.5514203",
        url = "https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5514203"
    }
  task_templates:
  - text-classification:
      input_column: content
      label_column: category
      languages:
      - sw
license: apache-2.0
task_categories:
- text-classification
language:
- sw
---

# Dataset Card for Swahili News Classification Dataset

## Dataset Summary

Swahili is spoken by 100-150 million people across East Africa. In Tanzania, for example, Swahili is one of two national languages (the other is English) and is the official language of instruction in all schools. News in Swahili is an integral part of Tanzania's media sphere.
News contributes to education, technology, and a country's economic growth, and news in local languages plays an important cultural role in many African countries. In the modern age, however, African languages in news and other spheres are at risk of being lost as English becomes the dominant language in online spaces.
The Swahili news dataset was created to bridge the gap in utilizing the Swahili language to create NLP technologies. It aims to empower AI practitioners in Tanzania and across Africa, making them integral in the preservation and utilization of the Swahili language. This dataset, sourced from various websites providing news in Swahili, is a powerful resource for NLP research and development, and your role in utilizing it is crucial.
Curated explicitly for text classification tasks, the dataset categorises news content into six distinct topics, enabling the creation of robust NLP models that can more effectively understand and process Swahili text. Additionally, this dataset is included in the MTEB to evaluate the capability of embedders to classify Swahili news accurately. The high accuracy of this dataset is attributed to the human annotation process involved in its creation.


## Supported Tasks and Leaderboards

- `text-classification`: The dataset supports text classification tasks, particularly news categorization.

## Languages

The dataset is in Swahili.

## Dataset Structure

### Data Instances

An example of a data instance:
```json
{
  "content": "SERIKALI imesema haitakuwa tayari kuona amani na utulivu wa nchi inachezewa huku ikisisitiza uwepo wa umoja kati ya wananchi bila kujali tofauti ya imani, kabila au itikadi yoyote.Hayo yalisemwa na Naibu Waziri wa Mambo ya Ndani ya Nchi, Hamad Yussuf Masauni wakati akifungua semina ya siku mbili iliyofanyika jijini Dar es Salaam ikiwahusisha viongozi wa taasisi za Kiislamu, lengo ikiwa ni kuwakumbusha kuhubiri amani katika sehemu zao.Naibu Waziri amesema mwelekeo na malengo ya Serikali ya Awamu ya Tano ni kukuza maendeleo katika sehemu mbalimbali nchini lengo ikiwa kuinua maisha ya wananchi na nchi kwa ujumla.“Serikali hii imejidhatiti kuhakikisha maendeleo yanakuja kwa kasi na maendeleo hayawezi kuja ikiwa amani na utulivu haupo, sisi kama serikali tutahakikisha tunalinda amani iliyopo ili wananchi wapate kufanya shughuli za kiuchumi bila wasiwasi wowote,” amesema Masauni.Akizungumza wakati wa ufunguzi huo, Shehe wa Mkoa wa Dar es Salaam, Alhaji Alhad Mussa Salum aliihakikishia serikali kutokuwepo kwa mifarakano kati ya taasisi mbalimbali kama ilivyokuwepo awali huku akisisitiza kuendelea kwa umoja huo ili jamii ipate kuendelea.“Sisi kama Bakwata tunaihakikishia serikali uwepo wa umoja na ushirikiano baina ya baraza na taasisi zingine na tofauti zetu hazipelekei kukoseana au kuvunjiana heshima kwahiyo tunaomba serikali iamini uwepo wa maelewano mazuri tu kwa maendeleo ya nchi hii,” amesema Shehe Alhad.Semina hiyo ya siku mbili imejumuisha viongozi wa taasisi 100 huku mada ya Nafasi ya Taasisi za Kiislamu katika Kuleta Umoja na Kuishi kwa Amani itajadiliwa.",
  "category": "kitaifa",
}