🚧 Northern Pashto Multimodal Dataset 🚧

Pashto Multimodal Dataset — Metadata

About the Northern Pashto Language

Pashto (this collection uses Northern Pashto, ISO 639-3 code pbu) is spoken by tens of millions of people, primarily in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province of Pakistan and across Afghanistan, with speakers in this dataset drawn from areas such as Swabi, Swat, and Charsadda. Pashto has a strong oral and literary tradition, including a well-known body of proverbs, poetry, and the Pashtunwali code of customs and social conduct. While it has a comparatively larger body of digital and broadcast content than some regional languages, spoken, dialect-rich, informal Pashto — as opposed to standard/written registers — remains under-resourced for speech and NLP research.

Content Description

The dataset comprises unscripted, first-person interviews and talks in Pashto featuring speakers identified by speaker IDs, drawn from various towns and villages in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Topics span daily routines and childhood memories (childhood games, local games, memories of school and hostel life), place and identity (birthplace descriptions such as Swabi and Charsadda, village life in Manglor Swat), tradition and culture (Pashtun traditions and customs, wedding and death rituals, the role and impact of the Hujra, Pashto proverbs and poetry, friendship and rivalries among Pashtuns), social and generational topics (past vs. present education for women, the role of mother tongue in education, the impact of technology and artificial intelligence, healthy habits, children's care and training), religion (preparing for Namaz, the positive impact of prayer), and everyday life (professions, hobbies, travel experiences, weather's impact on daily life, environmental pollution).

Dataset Structure

The dataset consists of 209 folders, each corresponding to one recorded video segment. Each folder contains:

• 1 MP4 file — the video/audio recording of the segment

• 1 ELAN (.eaf) file — time-aligned annotation containing:

  • Native Pashto transcription (tx_pbu_native)

  • English translation (tr_eng)

In addition to the 209 folders, a separate TSV metadata file accompanies the dataset, providing speaker-level and clip-level metadata for every recording, including:

• Recording ID / folder name

• Speaker ID

• Duration

• Topic/description of the clip's content

• Number of speakers in the clip

• Speaker gender

• Speaker age group

Sample Metadata