Writing System and Speaker Metadata for 2,800+ Language Varieties
Daan van Esch, Tamar Lucassen, Sebastian Ruder, Isaac Caswell, Clara Rivera
Abstract
We describe an open-source dataset providing metadata for about 2,800 language varieties used in the world today. Specifically, the dataset provides the attested writing system(s) for each of these 2,800+ varieties, as well as an estimated speaker count for each variety. This dataset was developed through internal research and has been used for analyses around language technologies. This is the largest publicly-available, machine-readable resource with writing system and speaker information for the world’s languages. We analyze the distribution of languages and writing systems in our data and compare it to their representation in current NLP. We hope the availability of this data will catalyze research in under-represented languages.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.lrec-1.538
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Marseille, France
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
- Venue:
- LREC
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Language Resources Association
- Note:
- Pages:
- 5035–5046
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.538
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Daan van Esch, Tamar Lucassen, Sebastian Ruder, Isaac Caswell, and Clara Rivera. 2022. Writing System and Speaker Metadata for 2,800+ Language Varieties. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 5035–5046, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
- Cite (Informal):
- Writing System and Speaker Metadata for 2,800+ Language Varieties (van Esch et al., LREC 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_acl24_videos/2022.lrec-1.538.pdf
- Code
- google-research/url-nlp