Nigerian language data, collected from Nigerians who were paid for it and asked first.
We are Ranked Technologies Limited, a Nigerian company, RC 9522220, registered with the Nigeria Data Protection Commission as a data controller, NDPC/DCP/14538. We trade as 9jatesters.
9jaVoice, read-aloud and spontaneous speech in Nigerian languages, one dataset per language, under CC BY-NC 4.0.
Every clip carries the id of the consent record it rides on. A contributor ticked an optional box, unticked by default, that was never a condition of doing the work or being paid. We hold a great deal more Nigerian speech than we have published. What is here is what cleared that box.
A read-aloud clip contains two people's work: the voice and the sentence. Most of our lines were written by other contributors, so we ask the writer as well as the speaker, and a clip stays out unless both agreed. That rule roughly halved the first release. We think it is the right trade.
We will not publish work under a licence broader than what people were asked. Our contributors agreed to a free, open dataset that anyone can download and keep at no charge. They were not asked whether a stranger could build a business on it, so these datasets are non-commercial. A Creative Commons licence cannot be revoked once someone holds a copy, which is exactly why the narrower one is the honest one.
If you want this data commercially, that is a real conversation and we can license it separately.
9jaBench is our benchmark for Nigerian-language models. We publish our own model's losses on it, including the benchmarks where better-funded labs beat us. A leaderboard that only shows its owner winning is marketing, not measurement.
NGPT is the Nigerian-language model we train, and the reason this data exists.
support@9jatesters.com or support@ranked.ng
Write to license data commercially, to ask how something was collected, to withdraw your consent if you are a contributor, or to tell us something we have published is wrong. The last one is welcome and we will correct it in public.