boffire/kabyle-toponyms

Algeria French–Kabyle Toponym Corpus

A reproducible, georeferenced parallel corpus of Algerian place names extracted from OpenStreetMap, mapping name:fr to name:kab.

Description

This dataset contains every OpenStreetMap object in Algeria that is simultaneously tagged with both French (name:fr) and Kabyle (name:kab) names. It covers cities, towns, villages, hamlets, roads, and administrative boundaries.

The corpus is designed for:

• GPS localization (bilingual map labeling)
• Machine Translation (French ↔ Kabyle)
• Named Entity Recognition (NER) for Kabyle
• Speech Synthesis / ASR text resources
• Linguistic research on Amazigh toponymy

Source & Reproducibility

• Raw data: Geofabrik Algeria extract
• Original authors: © OpenStreetMap contributors
• Extraction method: osmium tags-filter → osmium cat -f opl → Python parser
• License: ODbL 1.0
• Last extraction: 2026-05-25
• Repository: boffire/kabyle-toponyms

To reproduce the dataset locally:

pip install datasets huggingface_hub requests tqdm
# Requires osmium-tool (apt install osmium-tool / brew install osmium-tool)
python build_corpus.py --hub-id boffire/kabyle-toponyms --token $HF_TOKEN

Schema

Column	Type	Description
french	string	French name (name:fr tag)
kabyle	string	Kabyle name (name:kab tag)
osm_id	int64	OpenStreetMap object ID
osm_type	string	Object type: node, way, relation
category	string	Semantic class: city, town, village, hamlet, highway:*, admin:*
latitude	float32	Latitude (populated for node objects only)
longitude	float32	Longitude (populated for node objects only)
name_tags	string	JSON blob of all name:* tags for audit & traceability
source_date	string	Extraction date (YYYY-MM-DD)

Usage

Load with 🤗 Datasets

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("boffire/kabyle-toponyms", split="train")

# Sample record
print(ds[0])
# {
#   'french': 'Constantine',
#   'kabyle': 'Qsemṭina',
#   'osm_id': 27564946,
#   'osm_type': 'node',
#   'category': 'city',
#   'latitude': 36.36416244506836,
#   'longitude': 6.608428001403809,
#   'name_tags': '{"name:fr": "Constantine", "name:kab": "Qsemṭina", ...}',
#   'source_date': '2026-05-25'
# }

Quick stats

from collections import Counter

# Category distribution
print(Counter(ds["category"]))

# OSM type distribution
print(Counter(ds["osm_type"]))

# Filter cities only
cities = ds.filter(lambda x: x["category"] == "city")
print(f"Cities: {len(cities)}")

Statistics

Metric	Value
Total unique pairs	7,398
Nodes (with GPS)	4,504
Ways	795
Relations	2,099
Categories	city, town, village, hamlet, highway:, admin:

Coverage & Known Biases

• Geographic bias: Coverage is limited by OpenStreetMap tagging completeness. Kabylie (Tizi-Ouzou, Béjaïa, Bouira) is naturally over-represented because name:kab tagging is denser there. The Sahara and non-Kabyle regions are under-represented.
• Road bias: Roads (highway=*) with dual French/Kabyle tagging are less common than populated places.
• Administrative duplicates: Administrative boundaries (boundary=administrative) may duplicate names already present as place=* nodes. Deduplication is performed on the tuple (french, kabyle, category).
• No exhaustivity: This is not a complete gazetteer of Algeria. It is a complete extraction of all OSM objects that happen to carry both language tags at the time of extraction.

Data Quality & Preprocessing

1. Filtering: Only objects with both non-empty name:fr and name:kab tags are retained.
2. Classification: Objects are categorized by place, highway, or boundary keys.
3. Deduplication: Identical (french, kabyle, category) tuples are collapsed to a single record.
4. Decoding: OPL-encoded UTF-8 sequences (%HH%) are decoded to proper Unicode (ẓẒ, ṛṚ, ṭṬ, ɛƐ, ɣƔ, ṣṢ, ḍḌ, ǧǦ, ḥḤ, čČ).
5. No manual curation: All entries reflect the state of OSM at extraction time. Errors or inconsistencies in OSM tags are preserved.

Languages

• French (fr): Official language of Algeria, widely used in administration and maps.
• Kabyle (kab): Amazigh language spoken primarily in Kabylie and parts of northern Algeria. Written in Latin script with extended characters (ẓẒ, ṛṚ, ṭṬ, ɛƐ, ɣƔ, ṣṢ, ḍḌ, ǧǦ, ḥḤ, čČ).

License

The dataset (toponym pairs and metadata) is derived from OpenStreetMap and licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0.

© OpenStreetMap contributors. You are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt our data, as long as you credit OpenStreetMap and its contributors. If you alter or build upon our data, you may distribute the result only under the same licence.

The extraction code is provided under the MIT License (see the source repository).

Citation

If you use this dataset in academic work, please cite both the dataset and OpenStreetMap:

@dataset{kabyle-toponyms_osm_2026,
  author       = {OpenStreetMap contributors},
  title        = {Algeria French--Kabyle Toponym Corpus},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {HuggingFace},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/boffire/kabyle-toponyms}},
  note         = {Extracted from OpenStreetMap under ODbL 1.0}
}

Acknowledgments

• OpenStreetMap contributors in Algeria and the Kabyle community for tagging bilingual names.
• Geofabrik for daily OSM extracts.
• Osmium Tool for fast PBF filtering and conversion.