South African Language Identification Hack 2022 EDSA 2201 & 2207 classification hackathon
South Africa is a multicultural society that is characterised by its rich linguistic diversity. Language is an indispensable tool that can be used to deepen democracy and also contribute to the social, cultural, intellectual, economic and political life of the South African society.
The country is multilingual with 11 official languages, each of which is guaranteed equal status. Most South Africans are multilingual and able to speak at least two or more of the official languages. From South African Government
With such a multilingual population, it is only obvious that our systems and devices also communicate in multi-languages.
In this challenge, you will take text which is in any of South Africa's 11 Official languages and identify which language the text is in. This is an example of NLP's Language Identification, the task of determining the natural language that a piece of text is written in.
you will take text which is in any of South Africa's 11 Official languages and identify which language the text is in. This is an example of NLP's Language Identification, the task of determining the natural language that a piece of text is written in using various classification models.
The dataset used for this challenge is the NCHLT Text Corpora collected by the South African Department of Arts and Culture & Centre for Text Technology (CTexT, North-West University, South Africa). The training set was improved through additional cleaning done by Praekelt.
The data is in the form Language ID, Text. The text is in various states of cleanliness. Some NLP techniques will be necessary to clean up the data. File descriptions
- train_set.csv - the training set
- test_set.csv - the test set
- sample_submission.csv - a sample submission file in the correct format
Language IDs
- afr - Afrikaans
- eng - English
- nbl - isiNdebele
- nso - Sepedi
- sot - Sesotho
- ssw - siSwati
- tsn - Setswana
- tso - Xitsonga
- ven - Tshivenda
- xho - isiXhosa
- zul - isiZulu