Beyond Catalogue Counts: the Dataset Visibility Asymmetry in Low-Resource Multilingual NLP

TL;DR

This paper investigates the discrepancy between dataset visibility in catalogues and actual research activity for low-resource languages, revealing a significant gap and emphasizing the importance of documentation and discoverability.

Contribution

It introduces the Resource Density Index (RDI) and combines catalogue data with literature mining to uncover dataset activity in low-resource languages.

Findings

Many large languages have low catalogue visibility but active datasets in research literature.

A substantial number of datasets are openly accessible despite low catalogue records.

The visibility gap affects multilingual NLP data availability and documentation.

Abstract

Multilingual NLP often relies on dataset counts from centralized catalogues to characterize which languages are resource-rich or resource-poor. However, these catalogues record only one layer of dataset visibility: what has been registered or institutionally distributed. They do not necessarily reflect which datasets are created, cited, or reused in the research literature. To examine this gap, we combine a catalogue-based baseline with literature-backed evidence of dataset circulation. We introduce the Resource Density Index (RDI), defined as the number of catalogued datasets per one million speakers, and compute it for the 200 most widely spoken languages in Ethnologue. Among them, 118 languages (59%) have an average RDI of zero across the LRE Map and the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), and another 23 fall below 0.1, corresponding to at most one catalogued dataset per ten million speakers. We then apply an LLM-assisted citation-mining pipeline over the Semantic Scholar corpus to these 141 low-visibility languages. After manual validation and consolidation, we identify 609 unique datasets across 53 languages, of which 356 remain openly accessible through working public links. These results reveal a substantial visibility gap: many large-speaker languages appear data-poor in catalogue records yet show clear evidence of dataset activity in the research literature. Our findings suggest that multilingual data scarcity should be understood not only as a production problem, but also as a question of documentation, discoverability, and long-term accessibility. Code and data are publicly available at (https://github.com/zhiyintan/dataset-visibility-asymmetry).