A Systematic Survey of Natural Language Processing for the Greek Language

TL;DR

This paper presents a standardized framework for conducting systematic monolingual NLP surveys, applied to Greek language NLP from 2012 to 2023, highlighting research progress and resource gaps.

Contribution

It introduces a generalizable, bias-minimizing survey framework with structured protocols, taxonomy-based classification, and resource analysis, demonstrated through Greek NLP case study.

Findings

Identified key resource gaps in Greek NLP

Provided a comprehensive, publicly available survey resource

Demonstrated the framework's effectiveness for under-resourced languages

Abstract

Comprehensive monolingual Natural Language Processing (NLP) surveys are essential for assessing language-specific challenges, resource availability, and research gaps. However, existing surveys often lack standardized methodologies, leading to selection bias and fragmented coverage of NLP tasks and resources. This study introduces a generalizable framework for systematic monolingual NLP surveys. Our approach integrates a structured search protocol to minimize bias, an NLP task taxonomy for classification, and language resource taxonomies to identify potential benchmarks and highlight opportunities for improving resource availability. We apply this framework to Greek NLP (2012-2023), providing an in-depth analysis of its current state, task-specific progress, and resource gaps. The survey results are publicly available (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15314882) and are regularly updated to provide an evergreen resource. This systematic survey of Greek NLP serves as a case study, demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework and its potential for broader application to other not so well-resourced languages as regards NLP.