A Survey of Corpora for Germanic Low-Resource Languages and Dialects
This work addresses the problem of resource scarcity for researchers in NLP focusing on non-standardized low-resource languages, but it is incremental as it provides a survey rather than new methods or data.
The paper tackles the lack of systematic knowledge about corpora for low-resource Germanic languages and dialects by conducting a survey, finding that manually annotated linguistic resources are sparse and mostly cover morphosyntax, and making an overview of over 80 corpora publicly available.
Despite much progress in recent years, the vast majority of work in natural language processing (NLP) is on standard languages with many speakers. In this work, we instead focus on low-resource languages and in particular non-standardized low-resource languages. Even within branches of major language families, often considered well-researched, little is known about the extent and type of available resources and what the major NLP challenges are for these language varieties. The first step to address this situation is a systematic survey of available corpora (most importantly, annotated corpora, which are particularly valuable for NLP research). Focusing on Germanic low-resource language varieties, we provide such a survey in this paper. Except for geolocation (origin of speaker or document), we find that manually annotated linguistic resources are sparse and, if they exist, mostly cover morphosyntax. Despite this lack of resources, we observe that interest in this area is increasing: there is active development and a growing research community. To facilitate research, we make our overview of over 80 corpora publicly available. We share a companion website of this overview at https://github.com/mainlp/germanic-lrl-corpora .