metadata
language:
- zu
- en
task_categories:
- text-generation
- translation
- text-classification
- token-classification
- summarization
pretty_name: isiZulu post-training (Walia-style instruction data)
size_categories:
- 100K<n<1M
configs:
- config_name: default
data_files:
- split: train
path: data/train-*
- split: validation
path: data/validation-*
zul-post-training
isiZulu instruction / chat data compiled from public datasets in the style of Walia-LLM (Azime et al., 2024,
arXiv:2402.08015), in the same row format as SaarAI/kin-post-training and SaarAI/amh-post-training:
task datasets (translation, classification, tagging, NER, generation) are converted to instructions using
paraphrased templates (templates.json), and existing instruction / chat sets are added as-is.
961,834 train / 4,859 validation rows. Validation is a random per-task holdout (0.5%, 20-1000 rows per task).
Columns
id, source, task, instruction_lang (zul or en = language of the template, native = source already an
instruction/chat set), instruction, input, output, messages (chat form: list of role/content dicts, multi-turn
for chat sources; for multi-turn rows instruction / output are the first user / assistant turn).
Tasks
| task | rows |
|---|---|
| translation_zul_en | 207,229 |
| translation_en_zul | 207,229 |
| code_chat | 176,492 |
| chat | 88,624 |
| instruction_following | 83,267 |
| question_answering | 56,641 |
| text_continuation | 40,000 |
| generation | 24,405 |
| summarization | 19,885 |
| dialogue | 9,996 |
| text_simplification | 9,976 |
| paraphrase_identification | 9,928 |
| event_linking | 9,733 |
| named_entity_recognition | 5,844 |
| translation | 5,216 |
| hate_speech_detection | 2,737 |
| intent_classification | 2,240 |
| title_generation | 1,791 |
| article_generation | 1,791 |
| aya_human | 1,652 |
| pos_tagging | 753 |
| topic_classification | 701 |
| news_topic_classification | 563 |
Sources
| source key | dataset | note |
|---|---|---|
| autshumato_zul | Mehgoss/sa-languages-translation (zu-en, autshumato) |
en-zu government / health / agriculture sentence pairs |
| vukuzenzele_zul | dsfsi/vukuzenzele-sentence-aligned (eng-zul) | government-newspaper pairs (lower-cased); alignment score >= 0.8 |
| govza_cabinet | dsfsi/govza-sa-cabinet-statements-sentence-aligned (eng-zul) | cabinet statements; alignment score >= 0.8 |
| smol_sent, smol_doc | google/smol (smolsent / smoldoc en_zu) | professional en->zu sentence and document translations |
| sib200 | Davlan/sib200 (zul_Latn) | topic classification (7 classes) |
| injongo_intent | masakhane/InjongoIntent (zul) | intent classification (40 intents) |
| za_isizulu_news | dsfsi/za-isizulu-siswati-news | Isolezwe headline topic classification (5 classes) |
| afrihate | afrihate/afrihate (zul) | hate / abuse detection (3 classes) |
| masakhapos | masakhane/masakhapos (zul) | UPOS tagging |
| masakhaner2 | MasakhaNER 2.0 (zul train, GitHub) | named entity recognition (PER / LOC / ORG) |
| wikipedia_zu | wikimedia/wikipedia (20231101.zu) | Wikipedia -> article / title generation (>= 50 words) |
| fineweb2_zul | HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-2 (zul_Latn) | web text -> text continuation (40k sample) |
| gsma_conversations_zul | israel/zulu (train + validation) | grounded multi-agent conversations (GSMA pipeline) |
| multiturn_combined_zul | israel/multiturn_combined (zulu) |
multi-turn conversations |
| wikiconversations_zul | israel/WikiConversations (isizulu) |
multi-turn conversations grounded in Wikipedia |
| african_ultrachat_zul | masakhane/african-ultrachat (Zulu train) | multi-turn chat |
| kakugo_zul | ptrdvn/kakugo-zul | synthetic chat; <think> blocks removed |
| smoltalk_zul | 2b2e/smoltalk-zulu-mtl | machine-translated SmolTalk (system turns dropped) |
| self_instruct_zul | 2b2e/zulu-self_instruct-syn | synthetic self-instruct |
| code170k_zul | michsethowusu/Code-170k-zulu | machine-translated code Q&A chat |
| alpaca_zul | saillab/alpaca-zulu-cleaned | machine-translated Alpaca |
| dolly_zul | saillab/taco-datasets (Dolly-15k Zulu) | machine-translated Dolly |
| aya_* | CohereLabs/aya_collection_language_split (zulu train) | Aya mix (translated); each sub-dataset capped at 10k |
| inkuba_mafand, inkuba_afriqa | lelapa/Inkuba-instruct (isizulu_train) | MAFAND news MT and AfriQA, Inkuba's own isiZulu instructions |
Row counts per source key:
| source | rows |
|---|---|
| autshumato_zul | 390,256 |
| code170k_zul | 176,492 |
| alpaca_zul | 40,317 |
| fineweb2_zul | 40,000 |
| smoltalk_zul | 39,650 |
| kakugo_zul | 36,128 |
| self_instruct_zul | 28,878 |
| govza_cabinet | 17,396 |
| dolly_zul | 14,072 |
| aya_SODA_inst_T | 9,996 |
| aya_Wiki_split_inst_T | 9,976 |
| aya_Adversarial_QA_T | 9,967 |
| aya_CNN_Daily_Mail_T | 9,950 |
| aya_Flan_GEM_wiki_lingua_T | 9,935 |
| aya_PAWS_Wiki_T | 9,928 |
| aya_PIQA_T | 9,926 |
| aya_Mintaka_inst_T | 9,911 |
| aya_Flan_CoT_submix_T | 9,826 |
| aya_HotpotQA_T | 9,801 |
| aya_Xlel_wd_inst_T | 9,733 |
| aya_Dolly_v2_T | 9,689 |
| aya_NQ_Open_T | 8,549 |
| aya_Flan_Coqa_T | 6,408 |
| masakhaner2 | 5,844 |
| inkuba_mafand | 5,216 |
| african_ultrachat_zul | 4,899 |
| vukuzenzele_zul | 4,404 |
| aya_Flan_lambada_T | 4,156 |
| wikipedia_zu | 3,582 |
| multiturn_combined_zul | 3,547 |
| gsma_conversations_zul | 2,796 |
| afrihate | 2,737 |
| injongo_intent | 2,240 |
| smol_sent | 1,724 |
| aya_Aya_Dataset | 1,652 |
| wikiconversations_zul | 1,604 |
| aya_WIKI_QA_T | 1,037 |
| masakhapos | 753 |
| aya_Joke_explaination_inst_T | 734 |
| sib200 | 701 |
| smol_doc | 678 |
| za_isizulu_news | 563 |
| aya_Flan_unified_QA_T | 536 |
| inkuba_afriqa | 296 |
| aya_AfriQA_inst | 210 |
Filtering
- Chat / instruction sources: system turns dropped,
<think>blocks removed, conversations with an empty or literal "None" turn dropped, decoding-collapse (a word repeated 8+ times in a row, or very low compressibility) dropped, and GlotLID (cis-lmu/glotlid) must givezul_Latn>= 0.5 on the assistant text (code chat excluded). - Translation pairs: zu/en character-length ratio 0.5-3.0, at least 2 words per side, identical pairs dropped.
- 14,978 exact duplicates were removed (same task + input/instruction + output; full conversation for chat).
| reason | rows removed |
|---|---|
| aya_SODA_inst_T: over cap 10000 | 1,181,582 |
| aya_Wiki_split_inst_T: over cap 10000 | 979,944 |
| aya_Xlel_wd_inst_T: over cap 10000 | 513,112 |
| aya_HotpotQA_T: over cap 10000 | 345,476 |
| aya_NQ_Open_T: over cap 10000 | 165,850 |
| aya_CNN_Daily_Mail_T: over cap 10000 | 90,000 |
| aya_Flan_CoT_submix_T: over cap 10000 | 81,910 |
| aya_PAWS_Wiki_T: over cap 10000 | 39,401 |
| aya_Flan_GEM_wiki_lingua_T: over cap 10000 | 17,147 |
| wikipedia_zu: < 50 words | 9,770 |
| aya_PIQA_T: over cap 10000 | 6,113 |
| aya_Dolly_v2_T: over cap 10000 | 4,808 |
| kakugo_zul: not isiZulu (GlotLID) | 4,519 |
| aya_Mintaka_inst_T: over cap 10000 | 4,000 |
| self_instruct_zul: not isiZulu (GlotLID) | 3,959 |
| autshumato_zul: bad pair (length ratio / too short / identical) | 3,509 |
| govza_cabinet: alignment score < 0.8 | 3,493 |
| smoltalk_zul: decoding collapse | 2,728 |
| smoltalk_zul: not isiZulu (GlotLID) | 2,004 |
| aya_NQ_Open_T: not isiZulu (GlotLID) | 1,438 |
| alpaca_zul: not isiZulu (GlotLID) | 1,266 |
| dolly_zul: not isiZulu (GlotLID) | 918 |
| kakugo_zul: malformed / empty / None turn | 735 |
| vukuzenzele_zul: alignment score < 0.8 | 421 |
| aya_Dolly_v2_T: not isiZulu (GlotLID) | 296 |
| code170k_zul: malformed / empty / None turn | 263 |
| aya_Xlel_wd_inst_T: not isiZulu (GlotLID) | 253 |
| code170k_zul: decoding collapse | 233 |
| inkuba_afriqa: empty instruction / target | 187 |
| aya_Flan_CoT_submix_T: not isiZulu (GlotLID) | 172 |
| govza_cabinet: bad pair (length ratio / too short / identical) | 134 |
| aya_HotpotQA_T: not isiZulu (GlotLID) | 126 |
| aya_Flan_lambada_T: not isiZulu (GlotLID) | 123 |
| multiturn_combined_zul: not isiZulu (GlotLID) | 115 |
| aya_PIQA_T: not isiZulu (GlotLID) | 67 |
| self_instruct_zul: decoding collapse | 64 |
| aya_Flan_GEM_wiki_lingua_T: not isiZulu (GlotLID) | 55 |
| wikiconversations_zul: not isiZulu (GlotLID) | 51 |
| aya_CNN_Daily_Mail_T: not isiZulu (GlotLID) | 34 |
| aya_AfriQA_inst: not isiZulu (GlotLID) | 29 |
| aya_Wiki_split_inst_T: not isiZulu (GlotLID) | 24 |
| vukuzenzele_zul: bad pair (length ratio / too short / identical) | 23 |
| gsma_conversations_zul: not isiZulu (GlotLID) | 20 |
| aya_Adversarial_QA_T: not isiZulu (GlotLID) | 18 |
| aya_Aya_Dataset: not isiZulu (GlotLID) | 11 |
| alpaca_zul: decoding collapse | 10 |
| aya_Flan_GEM_wiki_lingua_T: decoding collapse | 10 |
| multiturn_combined_zul: decoding collapse | 9 |
| aya_Dolly_v2_T: decoding collapse | 9 |
| aya_Mintaka_inst_T: not isiZulu (GlotLID) | 8 |
| aya_PAWS_Wiki_T: not isiZulu (GlotLID) | 8 |
| aya_Xlel_wd_inst_T: decoding collapse | 7 |
| aya_Xlel_wd_inst_T: malformed / empty / None turn | 7 |
| dolly_zul: decoding collapse | 5 |
| aya_Adversarial_QA_T: decoding collapse | 5 |
| aya_Flan_unified_QA_T: not isiZulu (GlotLID) | 4 |
| aya_PIQA_T: decoding collapse | 4 |
| aya_SODA_inst_T: not isiZulu (GlotLID) | 4 |
| kakugo_zul: decoding collapse | 3 |
| aya_Flan_CoT_submix_T: decoding collapse | 2 |
| aya_WIKI_QA_T: not isiZulu (GlotLID) | 2 |
| smol_sent: bad pair (length ratio / too short / identical) | 1 |
| wikiconversations_zul: malformed / empty / None turn | 1 |
| african_ultrachat_zul: malformed / empty / None turn | 1 |
| aya_Flan_Coqa_T: decoding collapse | 1 |
Known limitations (please read)
- The isiZulu instruction templates (
templates.json) and translated label names were drafted by an AI model and have not been reviewed by a native speaker. - Quality varies by source:
code170k_zul,alpaca_zul,dolly_zul,smoltalk_zuland theaya_*(T) sets are machine-translated;kakugo_zulandself_instruct_zulare synthetic. Use thesourcecolumn to filter or reweight. vukuzenzele_zulandinkuba_mafandtext is lower-cased in the source.translation_zul_enoutputs are English.- Excluded after inspection:
Helsinki-NLP/opus-100 en-zu(software UI strings),michsethowusu/english-zulu_sentence-pairs(many misaligned / garbage pairs), the 11.3Mwmt22rows oflelapa/Inkuba-instruct(noisy mined pairs, mostly zu->xx), and FLORES-derived data (benchmark). Benchmarks (AfriXNLI, AfriMMLU, AfriMGSM, Belebele, Uhura) were not used. - Only train splits were used (plus
israel/zuluvalidation); test splits of all sources (incl.israel/zulutest, SIB-200, InjongoIntent, AfriHate, MasakhaPOS/NER) remain usable for evaluation. - Only exact duplicates were removed; near-duplicates and overlap between sources (e.g. Wikipedia vs. FineWeb-2, Aya vs. Inkuba) may remain. Licenses differ per source (Alpaca / Dolly / Aya derived data carry upstream terms; some sources have no license); check each before commercial use.