Mining Wikidata for Name Resources for African Languages
This work addresses data scarcity for African languages, enabling better NLP tools, though it is incremental as it builds on existing Wikidata mining approaches.
The authors tackled the lack of language technology resources for African languages by creating a Wikidata-derived resource of name lists for 28 languages, resulting in approximately 1.9 million names across common entity types.
This work supports further development of language technology for the languages of Africa by providing a Wikidata-derived resource of name lists corresponding to common entity types (person, location, and organization). While we are not the first to mine Wikidata for name lists, our approach emphasizes scalability and replicability and addresses data quality issues for languages that do not use Latin scripts. We produce lists containing approximately 1.9 million names across 28 African languages. We describe the data, the process used to produce it, and its limitations, and provide the software and data for public use. Finally, we discuss the ethical considerations of producing this resource and others of its kind.