Bhaskar Krishnmachari


2026

The term "low-resource" is used pervasively in NLP but communicates almost nothing precise. We propose RAN (Resource Abundance Notation), a compact, multi-dimensional notation for quantifying a language’s NLP resource profile. A RAN score is written as S/M/L_1-B_1/L_2-B_2/..., where S = floor(log10(speakers)), M = floor(log10(monolingual sentences)), and each L_i-B_i pair records a bilingual partner and floor(log10(parallel sentences)). Values derive from canonical sources: Wikidata for speakers, OSCAR 23.01 for monolingual corpora, and (where available) OPUS for parallel corpora. We score 20 typologically diverse languages and correlate each profile against published benchmarks for three tasks: machine translation (MT, via NLLB-200 chrF++), named entity recognition (NER, via XTREME XLM-R WikiANN F1), and part-of-speech tagging (POS, via XTREME XLM-R UD accuracy). The RAN components carry complementary information: a linear model using all three explains 52% of MT variance, 76% of NER variance, and 72% of POS variance. Among single predictors, B_max (the largest bilingual corpus, regardless of partner) is strongest for the cross-lingual transfer tasks (NER, POS), while M and B_en are strongest for MT. RAN is designed first as a communication tool, not a predictive model.