Mining Wikidata for Name Resources for African Languages

TL;DR

This paper presents a scalable method for extracting and providing a large, multilingual name resource from Wikidata to support language technology development for African languages, addressing data quality and script diversity issues.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable, replicable approach to mining Wikidata for name lists in African languages, including non-Latin scripts, with publicly available data and software.

Findings

Produced approximately 1.9 million names across 28 African languages

Addressed data quality issues for non-Latin scripts

Discussed ethical considerations of resource creation

Abstract

This work supports further development of language technology for the languages of Africa by providing a Wikidata-derived resource of name lists corresponding to common entity types (person, location, and organization). While we are not the first to mine Wikidata for name lists, our approach emphasizes scalability and replicability and addresses data quality issues for languages that do not use Latin scripts. We produce lists containing approximately 1.9 million names across 28 African languages. We describe the data, the process used to produce it, and its limitations, and provide the software and data for public use. Finally, we discuss the ethical considerations of producing this resource and others of its kind.