A Survey of Corpora for Germanic Low-Resource Languages and Dialects

Blaschke, Verena; Schütze, Hinrich und Plank, Barbara (May 2023): A Survey of Corpora for Germanic Low-Resource Languages and Dialects. 24th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa 2023), Tórshavn, Faroe Islands, May 22-24, 2023. Alumäe, Tanel und Fishel, Mark (eds.) : In: Proceedings of the 24th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa), pp. 392-414

Abstract

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.

• Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
• EU Funded Grant Agreement Number: 740516
• EU Projects: Horizon 2020 > ERC Grants > ERC Advanced Grant > ERC Grant 740516: NonSequeToR - Non-sequence models for tokenization replacement
• Research Centers: Center for Information and Language Processing (CIS)
• Subjects: 400 Language > 400 Language; 400 Language > 410 Linguistics
• Annotation: ISBN: 978-99-1621-999-7
• Language: English