| --- |
| language: |
| - af |
| - en |
| - nr |
| - nso |
| - st |
| - ss |
| - tn |
| - ts |
| - ve |
| - xh |
| - zu |
| tags: |
| - pretraining |
| - south-african-languages |
| - multilingual |
| - mzansitext |
| - deduplicated |
| license: apache-2.0 |
| dataset_info: |
| features: |
| - name: text |
| dtype: string |
| - name: lang |
| dtype: string |
| splits: |
| - name: validation |
| num_bytes: 50448243 |
| num_examples: 19940 |
| - name: test |
| num_bytes: 50257814 |
| num_examples: 19784 |
| - name: train |
| num_bytes: 15178461663 |
| num_examples: 3744654 |
| download_size: 9577076320 |
| dataset_size: 15279167720 |
| configs: |
| - config_name: default |
| data_files: |
| - split: validation |
| path: data/validation-* |
| - split: test |
| path: data/test-* |
| - split: train |
| path: data/train-* |
| --- |
| |
| # MzansiText — deduplicated release |
|
|
| This is a conservatively deduplicated release of [MzansiText](https://huggingface.co/datasets/uctnlp/mzansi-text), a multilingual pretraining corpus for all eleven official South African languages. |
|
|
| Use the original release to reproduce the paper and its trained models. Use this release for new experiments where cross-source duplicate documents should be removed. |
|
|
| ## Dataset details |
|
|
| - Splits: 3,744,654 train rows, 19,940 validation rows, and 19,784 test rows |
| - Total: 3,784,378 rows |
| - `lang` values: `afr`, `eng`, `nbl`, `nso`, `sot`, `ssw`, `tsn`, `tso`, `ven`, `xho`, `zul` |
| - Schema: `text` (string), `lang` (string) |
| - All eleven languages occur in every split. |
|
|
| Validation and test sets are capped at approximately 2M tokens per language to prevent high-resource languages from dominating early stopping. |
|
|
| ## Deduplication |
|
|
| Deduplication is performed before deterministic splitting. Each document is normalized with Unicode NFC, whitespace is collapsed and trimmed, and exact duplicates are identified by `(lang, SHA-256(normalized text))`. The language is part of the key so identical text labelled as different languages is retained. |
|
|
| The process removed 197,926 duplicate rows: |
|
|
| | Language label | Rows removed | |
| |---|---:| |
| | `afr` | 165,623 | |
| | `zul` | 19,156 | |
| | `xho` | 12,910 | |
| | `tso` | 231 | |
| | `sot` | 3 | |
| | `eng` | 1 | |
| | `nbl` | 1 | |
| | `nso` | 1 | |
| | **Total** | **197,926** | |
|
|
| An audit of the combined train, validation, and test splits found no remaining duplicates under this normalization and per-language key. |
|
|
| ## Usage |
|
|
| ```python |
| from datasets import load_dataset |
| |
| dataset = load_dataset("uctnlp/mzansi-text-deduplicated") |
| print(dataset) |
| ``` |
|
|
| ## Reproducibility |
|
|
| - Original paper-reproduction dataset: [uctnlp/mzansi-text](https://huggingface.co/datasets/uctnlp/mzansi-text) |
| - Deduplication implementation and config: [Anri-Lombard/sallm#123](https://github.com/Anri-Lombard/sallm/pull/123) |
| - Paper: [arXiv:2603.20732](https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20732) |
|
|
| ## Citation |
|
|
| ```bibtex |
| @misc{lombard2026mzansitextmzansilmopencorpus, |
| title={MzansiText and MzansiLM: An Open Corpus and Decoder-Only Language Model for South African Languages}, |
| author={Anri Lombard and Simbarashe Mawere and Temi Aina and Ethan Wolff and Sbonelo Gumede and Elan Novick and Francois Meyer and Jan Buys}, |
| year={2026}, |
| eprint={2603.20732}, |
| archivePrefix={arXiv}, |
| primaryClass={cs.CL}, |
| url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20732}, |
| } |
| ``` |
|
|
| ## License |
|
|
| Apache License 2.0 |
|
|
