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 manually annotated by native speakers.

This dataset stores passages which have been culled from news websites for CIRAL.

Dataset Structure

This dataset is configured by language. An example of a passage data entry is

{
    'docid': 'DOCID#0#0',
    'title': 'This is the title of a sample passage',
    'text': 'This is the content of a sample passage',
    'url': 'https:/\/\this-is-a-sample-url.com'
}

Load Dataset

An example to load the dataset

language = "hausa"

dataset = load_dataset("ciral/ciral-corpus", language)

Translated Dataset

We also include a translated version of the dataset in English for all the languages. Translation was done using NLLB 1.3B.

language = "hausa"

dataset = load_dataset("ciral/ciral-corpus", language, translated=True)

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}
}