Correcting FLORES Evaluation Dataset for Four African Languages

This paper describes the corrections made to the FLORES evaluation (dev and devtest) dataset for four African languages, namely Hausa, Northern Sotho (Sepedi), Xitsonga and isiZulu. The original dataset, though groundbreaking in its coverage of low-resource languages, exhibited various inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the reviewed languages that could potentially hinder the integrity of the evaluation of downstream tasks in natural language processing (NLP), especially machine translation. Through a meticulous review process by native speakers, several corrections were identified and implemented, improving the dataset's overall quality and reliability. For each language, we provide a concise summary of the errors encountered and corrected, and also present some statistical analysis that measure the difference between the existing and corrected datasets. We believe that our corrections enhance the linguistic accuracy and reliability of the data and, thereby, contributing to more effective evaluation of NLP tasks involving the four African languages.