djelia/bambara-texts

Dataset Summary

The Bambara-Texts dataset is a collection of monolingual Bambara text designed for pretraining language models. It provides a diverse set of textual data to improve natural language processing (NLP) applications for the Bambara language.

This dataset can be used for:

• Pretraining large language models (LLMs)
• Building word embeddings for Bambara
• Language modeling tasks such as masked language modeling (MLM) and autoregressive modeling
• Corpus-based linguistic research on Bambara

Project

This dataset is part of a broader initiative to advance Bambara NLP and bridge the gap in AI accessibility for low-resource languages. By providing high-quality monolingual data, we aim to enable better machine translation, speech recognition, and text generation models for Bambara.

Bambara Language

Bambara, also known as Bamanankan, is a Mande language spoken primarily in Mali by millions of people as both a first and second language. It serves as a lingua franca in Mali and is also spoken in parts of Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, and Senegal.

Bambara is traditionally written using the Latin script, though N'Ko script is also widely used. It has a strong oral tradition and plays a vital role in Malian cultural heritage.

Structure

The dataset consists of:

• text: Raw text samples in Bambara.
• source_dataset: The original dataset or project from which the text was sourced.

Citation

This dataset has been curated by oza75 at Djelia.

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

@misc{bambara-texts,
  author = {Djelia},
  title = {Bambara-Texts Dataset},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/djelia/bambara-texts}
}