Multilingual Open Text Release 1: Public Domain News in 44 Languages

TL;DR

This paper introduces MOT, a large multilingual news corpus in 44 languages, providing valuable resources for NLP tasks, especially for low-resource languages, with open licensing and ongoing updates.

Contribution

The creation and release of a comprehensive, multilingual news corpus in 44 languages, including data collection, processing, licensing, and open-source tools.

Findings

Contains over 2.8 million news articles and 1 million snippets

Covers languages with limited NLP resources

Openly licensed and regularly updated

Abstract

We present Multilingual Open Text (MOT), a new multilingual corpus containing text in 44 languages, many of which have limited existing text resources for natural language processing. The first release of the corpus contains over 2.8 million news articles and an additional 1 million short snippets (photo captions, video descriptions, etc.) published between 2001--2022 and collected from Voice of America's news websites. We describe our process for collecting, filtering, and processing the data. The source material is in the public domain, our collection is licensed using a creative commons license (CC BY 4.0), and all software used to create the corpus is released under the MIT License. The corpus will be regularly updated as additional documents are published.