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YoNER: A New Yorùbá Multi-domain Named Entity Recognition Dataset

Peace Busola Falola, Jesujoba O. Alabi, Solomon O. Akinola, Folashade T. Ogunajo, Emmanuel Oluwadunsin Alabi, David Ifeoluwa Adelani · Apr 7, 2026 · Citations: 0

How to use this page

Low trust

Use this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.

Best use

Background context only

What to verify

Validate the exact study setup in the full paper before operational use.

Evidence quality

Low

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Abstract

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a foundational NLP task, yet research in Yorùbá has been constrained by limited and domain-specific resources. Existing resources, such as MasakhaNER (a manually annotated news-domain corpus) and WikiAnn (automatically created from Wikipedia), are valuable but restricted in domain coverage. To address this gap, we present YoNER, a new multidomain Yorùbá NER dataset that extends entity coverage beyond news and Wikipedia. The dataset comprises about 5,000 sentences and 100,000 tokens collected from five domains including Bible, Blogs, Movies, Radio broadcast and Wikipedia, and annotated with three entity types: Person (PER), Organization (ORG) and Location (LOC), following CoNLL-style guidelines. Annotation was conducted manually by three native Yorùbá speakers, with an inter-annotator agreement of over 0.70, ensuring high quality and consistency. We benchmark several transformer encoder models using cross-domain experiments with MasakhaNER 2.0, and we also assess the effect of few-shot in-domain data using YoNER and cross-lingual setups with English datasets. Our results show that African-centric models outperform general multilingual models for Yorùbá, but cross-domain performance drops substantially, particularly for blogs and movie domains. Furthermore, we observed that closely related formal domains, such as news and Wikipedia, transfer more effectively. In addition, we introduce a new Yorùbá-specific language model (OyoBERT) that outperforms multilingual models in in-domain evaluation. We publicly release the YoNER dataset and pretrained OyoBERT models to support future research on Yorùbá natural language processing.

Abstract-only analysis — low confidence

All signals on this page are inferred from the abstract only and may be inaccurate. Do not use this page as a primary protocol reference.

  • This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.
  • The available metadata is too thin to trust this as a primary source.

Should You Rely On This Paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

A secondary eval reference to pair with stronger protocol papers.

Main weakness

This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.

Trust level

Low

Usefulness score

15/100 • Low

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

Human Feedback Signal

Not explicit in abstract metadata

Evaluation Signal

Detected

Usefulness for eval research

Adjacent candidate

Extraction confidence 45%

What We Could Verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

"Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a foundational NLP task, yet research in Yorùbá has been constrained by limited and domain-specific resources."

Evaluation Modes

partial

Automatic Metrics

Includes extracted eval setup.

"Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a foundational NLP task, yet research in Yorùbá has been constrained by limited and domain-specific resources."

Quality Controls

partial

Inter Annotator Agreement Reported

Calibration/adjudication style controls detected.

"Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a foundational NLP task, yet research in Yorùbá has been constrained by limited and domain-specific resources."

Benchmarks / Datasets

missing

Not extracted

No benchmark anchors detected.

"Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a foundational NLP task, yet research in Yorùbá has been constrained by limited and domain-specific resources."

Reported Metrics

partial

Agreement

Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.

"Annotation was conducted manually by three native Yorùbá speakers, with an inter-annotator agreement of over 0.70, ensuring high quality and consistency."

Human Feedback Details

  • Uses human feedback: No
  • Feedback types: None
  • Rater population: Not reported
  • Expertise required: Multilingual

Evaluation Details

  • Evaluation modes: Automatic Metrics
  • Agentic eval: None
  • Quality controls: Inter Annotator Agreement Reported
  • Evidence quality: Low
  • Use this page as: Background context only

Protocol And Measurement Signals

Benchmarks / Datasets

No benchmark or dataset names were extracted from the available abstract.

Reported Metrics

agreement

Research Brief

Metadata summary

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a foundational NLP task, yet research in Yorùbá has been constrained by limited and domain-specific resources.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key Takeaways

  • Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a foundational NLP task, yet research in Yorùbá has been constrained by limited and domain-specific resources.
  • Existing resources, such as MasakhaNER (a manually annotated news-domain corpus) and WikiAnn (automatically created from Wikipedia), are valuable but restricted in domain coverage.
  • To address this gap, we present YoNER, a new multidomain Yorùbá NER dataset that extends entity coverage beyond news and Wikipedia.

Researcher Actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Check the full text for explicit evaluation design choices (raters, protocol, and metrics).
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Research Summary

Contribution Summary

  • To address this gap, we present YoNER, a new multidomain Yorùbá NER dataset that extends entity coverage beyond news and Wikipedia.
  • Annotation was conducted manually by three native Yorùbá speakers, with an inter-annotator agreement of over 0.70, ensuring high quality and consistency.
  • In addition, we introduce a new Yorùbá-specific language model (OyoBERT) that outperforms multilingual models in in-domain evaluation.

Why It Matters For Eval

  • Annotation was conducted manually by three native Yorùbá speakers, with an inter-annotator agreement of over 0.70, ensuring high quality and consistency.
  • In addition, we introduce a new Yorùbá-specific language model (OyoBERT) that outperforms multilingual models in in-domain evaluation.

Researcher Checklist

  • Gap: Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Pass: Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Automatic Metrics

  • Pass: Quality control reporting appears

    Detected: Inter Annotator Agreement Reported

  • Gap: Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    No benchmark/dataset anchor extracted from abstract.

  • Pass: Metric reporting is present

    Detected: agreement

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Papers are ranked by protocol overlap, extraction signal alignment, and semantic proximity.

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