Endangered Languages are not Low-Resourced!

TL;DR

This paper argues that labeling endangered languages as low-resourced is misleading, highlighting the need to reconsider resource assumptions and emphasizing the unique challenges faced by endangered languages in NLP.

Contribution

The paper critically examines the common practice of equating endangered languages with low-resource languages, based on the author's personal insights.

Findings

Endangered languages are often misclassified as low-resourced.

The term 'low-resourced' may oversimplify the complexities of endangered languages.

A call for more nuanced understanding of resource availability in endangered languages.

Abstract

The term low-resourced has been tossed around in the field of natural language processing to a degree that almost any language that is not English can be called "low-resourced"; sometimes even just for the sake of making a mundane or mediocre paper appear more interesting and insightful. In a field where English is a synonym for language and low-resourced is a synonym for anything not English, calling endangered languages low-resourced is a bit of an overstatement. In this paper, I inspect the relation of the endangered with the low-resourced from my own experiences.