InstructLR: A Scalable Approach to Create Instruction Dataset for Under-Resourced Languages

Mamadou K. Keita, Sebastien Diarra, Christopher M Homan, Seydou Diallo


Abstract
Effective text generation and chat interfaces for low-resource languages (LRLs) remain a challenge for state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) to support. This is mainly due to the difficulty of curating high-quality instruction datasets for LRLs, a limitation prevalent in the languages spoken across the African continent and other regions. Current approaches, such as automated translation and synthetic data generation, frequently yield outputs that lack fluency or even orthographic consistency. In this paper, we introduce InstructLR, a novel framework designed to generate high-quality instruction datasets for LRLs. Our approach integrates LLM-driven text generation with a dual-layer quality filtering mechanism: an automated filtering layer based on retrieval-augmented-generation (RAG)-based n-shot prompting, and a human-in-the-loop validation layer. Drawing inspiration from benchmarks such as MMLU in task definition, InstructLR has facilitated the creation of three multi-domain instruction benchmarks: **ZarmaInstruct-50k**, **BambaraInstruct-50k**, and **FulfuldeInstruct-50k**.
Anthology ID:
2026.africanlp-main.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on African Natural Language Processing (AfricaNLP 2026)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Everlyn Asiko Chimoto, Constantine Lignos, Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Idris Abdulmumin, Clemencia Siro, David Ifeoluwa Adelani
Venues:
AfricaNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
17–36
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.africanlp-main.3/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mamadou K. Keita, Sebastien Diarra, Christopher M Homan, and Seydou Diallo. 2026. InstructLR: A Scalable Approach to Create Instruction Dataset for Under-Resourced Languages. In Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on African Natural Language Processing (AfricaNLP 2026), pages 17–36, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
InstructLR: A Scalable Approach to Create Instruction Dataset for Under-Resourced Languages (Keita et al., AfricaNLP 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.africanlp-main.3.pdf