Toward More Meaningful Resources for Lower-resourced Languages

TL;DR

This paper advocates for ethically developed, speaker-involved resources for lower-resourced languages, analyzing existing multilingual datasets and proposing guidelines for more meaningful and accurate resource creation.

Contribution

It provides a critical examination of current multilingual resources and offers ethical guidelines for developing better resources with speaker involvement.

Findings

Many language names in Wikidata are inaccurate or misclassified.

WikiAnn has quality issues but can be a supplementary resource.

Emphasizes the importance of ethical, speaker-inclusive annotation processes.

Abstract

In this position paper, we describe our perspective on how meaningful resources for lower-resourced languages should be developed in connection with the speakers of those languages. We first examine two massively multilingual resources in detail. We explore the contents of the names stored in Wikidata for a few lower-resourced languages and find that many of them are not in fact in the languages they claim to be and require non-trivial effort to correct. We discuss quality issues present in WikiAnn and evaluate whether it is a useful supplement to hand annotated data. We then discuss the importance of creating annotation for lower-resourced languages in a thoughtful and ethical way that includes the languages' speakers as part of the development process. We conclude with recommended guidelines for resource development.