Swahili is spoken by over 100 million people across East and Central Africa β yet remains vastly underrepresented in AI. This project closes that gap by creating open tools to train, deploy, and simulate models tailored to African linguistics and culture.
π Swahili NLP Model Trainer & Simulation Pipeline
A comprehensive project designed to simulate, train, and deploy Swahili language models for natural language understanding, generation, and speech integration. Built for researchers, AI practitioners, and edtech developers focusing on African languages.
π Overview
This repository contains all components required to build, fine-tune, and simulate Swahili NLP models, including:
Custom data ingestion pipelines
Preprocessing workflows
Model training using transformer architectures
Evaluation tools and inference interfaces
Voice/text simulation modules (optional)
β¨ Why Swahili?
Swahili is spoken by over 100 million people across East and Central Africa β yet remains vastly underrepresented in AI. This project closes that gap by creating open tools to train, deploy, and simulate models tailored to African linguistics and culture.
π§© Features
π§ Custom NLP model training (BERT, GPT-2, mT5, LLaMA variants)
π Multisource Swahili data ingestion (news, YouTube, chat)
πͺ Preprocessing with Swahili-aware tokenization
π― Evaluation & visualization dashboard
π Speech-to-text (ASR) + Text-to-speech (TTS) modules (optional)
β‘ Deployable via HuggingFace, TorchScript, or ONNX
ποΈ Project Structure
Edit
swahili-nlp-simulator/
βββ data/
β βββ raw/ # Unprocessed Swahili data
β βββ cleaned/ # Tokenized and filtered datasets
βββ src/
β βββ data_pipeline.py # Ingest, clean, and normalize text
β βββ tokenizer.py # Swahili-specific tokenizer (SentencePiece)
β βββ train.py # Model training loop (transformer-based)
β βββ evaluate.py # BLEU, F1, Perplexity metrics
β βββ simulate.py # Interactive chat + simulation environment
βββ models/
β βββ checkpoints/ # Trained models & weights
βββ notebooks/
β βββ analysis.ipynb # EDA, token stats, sample generation
βββ README.md
βββ requirements.txt
π Getting Started
1. Clone the Repository
Edit
git β¦