SomaliWeb v1: A Quality-Filtered Somali Web Corpus with a Matched Tokenizer and a Public Language-Identification Benchmark
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2605.18232 (cs)
[Submitted on 18 May 2026]
Title:SomaliWeb v1: A Quality-Filtered Somali Web Corpus with a Matched Tokenizer and a Public Language-Identification Benchmark
Authors:Khalid Yusuf Dahir
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Abstract:Somali is a Cushitic language of the Horn of Africa with ~25 million speakers, yet no documented dedicated Somali pretraining corpus with a companion tokenizer and language-identification benchmark has been publicly released. Existing Somali text appears either inside multilingual distributions (HPLT v2, CC100, MADLAD-400, OSCAR, mC4) or in small, undocumented Somali-only uploads on Hugging Face. We introduce SomaliWeb v1, a quality-filtered Somali corpus of 819,322 documents (~303M tokens) built from three upstream sources (HPLT v2, CC100, Somali Wikipedia) through a six-stage reproducible pipeline. We release (i) the corpus, (ii) a matched BPE-16K tokenizer, and (iii) the first public side-by-side Somali benchmark of three production language identifiers. Our measurements reveal concrete quality defects in existing distributions: HPLT v2's "cleaned" Somali release retains 17.3% byte-exact duplicates, 56.1% of its documents contain fixable mojibake, and 10.7% of its byte-unique documents are near-duplicates at Jaccard tau=0.80. Our BPE-16K tokenizer emits 40.2% fewer tokens than GPT-4's cl100k_base on FLORES-200 Somali devtest as a tokenizer-level measurement; downstream language-model perplexity comparisons are deferred to a follow-up release.
| Comments: | 16 pages, 6 figures, 6 tables. Code: this https URL Dataset: this https URL |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Information Retrieval (cs.IR) |
| ACM classes: | I.2.7 |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2605.18232 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2605.18232v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.18232
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
|
Submission history
From: Khalid Yusuf Dahir Mr [view email][v1] Mon, 18 May 2026 11:28:03 UTC (107 KB)
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