Beyond Counting Datasets: A Survey of Multilingual Dataset Construction and Necessary Resources
This work addresses the resource gap in multilingual NLP for researchers and practitioners, offering actionable insights but is incremental as it builds on existing awareness of disparities.
The paper tackles the problem of quantifying and characterizing disparities in multilingual NLP resources by analyzing 156 datasets, revealing that prior surveys based on dataset counts are misleading due to quality issues like automatic translation. It identifies strategies for improving data collection in low-resource languages through crowdsourcing experiments and provides community-level suggestions.
While the NLP community is generally aware of resource disparities among languages, we lack research that quantifies the extent and types of such disparity. Prior surveys estimating the availability of resources based on the number of datasets can be misleading as dataset quality varies: many datasets are automatically induced or translated from English data. To provide a more comprehensive picture of language resources, we examine the characteristics of 156 publicly available NLP datasets. We manually annotate how they are created, including input text and label sources and tools used to build them, and what they study, tasks they address and motivations for their creation. After quantifying the qualitative NLP resource gap across languages, we discuss how to improve data collection in low-resource languages. We survey language-proficient NLP researchers and crowd workers per language, finding that their estimated availability correlates with dataset availability. Through crowdsourcing experiments, we identify strategies for collecting high-quality multilingual data on the Mechanical Turk platform. We conclude by making macro and micro-level suggestions to the NLP community and individual researchers for future multilingual data development.