Toward More Meaningful Resources for Lower-resourced Languages
It addresses the problem of low-quality data for lower-resourced language communities, proposing incremental improvements through better practices.
The paper examines quality issues in existing multilingual resources like Wikidata and WikiAnn for lower-resourced languages, finding inaccuracies such as mislabeled names, and advocates for ethical, speaker-inclusive guidelines to develop more meaningful resources.
In this position paper, we describe our perspective on how meaningful resources for lower-resourced languages should be developed in connection with the speakers of those languages. We first examine two massively multilingual resources in detail. We explore the contents of the names stored in Wikidata for a few lower-resourced languages and find that many of them are not in fact in the languages they claim to be and require non-trivial effort to correct. We discuss quality issues present in WikiAnn and evaluate whether it is a useful supplement to hand annotated data. We then discuss the importance of creating annotation for lower-resourced languages in a thoughtful and ethical way that includes the languages' speakers as part of the development process. We conclude with recommended guidelines for resource development.