KINNEWS and KIRNEWS: Benchmarking Cross-Lingual Text Classification for Kinyarwanda and Kirundi

Rubungo Andre Niyongabo, Qu Hong, Julia Kreutzer, Li Huang


Abstract
Recent progress in text classification has been focused on high-resource languages such as English and Chinese. For low-resource languages, amongst them most African languages, the lack of well-annotated data and effective preprocessing, is hindering the progress and the transfer of successful methods. In this paper, we introduce two news datasets (KINNEWS and IRNEWS) for multi-class classification of news articles in Kinyarwanda and Kirundi, two low-resource African languages. The two languages are mutually intelligible, but while Kinyarwanda has been studied in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to some extent, this work constitutes the first study on Kirundi. Along with the datasets, we provide statistics, guidelines for preprocessing, and monolingual and cross-lingual baseline models. Our experiments show that training embeddings on the relatively higher-resourced Kinyarwanda yields successful cross-lingual transfer to Kirundi. In addition, the design of the created datasets allows for a wider use in NLP beyond text classification in future studies, such as representation learning, cross-lingual learning with more distant languages, or as base for new annotations for tasks such as parsing, POS tagging, and NER. The datasets, stopwords, and pre-trained embeddings are publicly available at https://github.com/Andrews2017/KINNEWS-and-KIRNEWS-Corpus.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.480
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5507–5521
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.480
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.480
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rubungo Andre Niyongabo, Qu Hong, Julia Kreutzer, and Li Huang. 2020. KINNEWS and KIRNEWS: Benchmarking Cross-Lingual Text Classification for Kinyarwanda and Kirundi. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 5507–5521, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
KINNEWS and KIRNEWS: Benchmarking Cross-Lingual Text Classification for Kinyarwanda and Kirundi (Niyongabo et al., COLING 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.480.pdf
Code
 Andrews2017/KINNEWS-and-KIRNEWS-Corpus
Data
KINNEWS and KIRNEWSJW300