Some Languages are More Equal than Others: Probing Deeper into the Linguistic Disparity in the NLP World

Surangika Ranathunga, Nisansa de Silva


Abstract
Linguistic disparity in the NLP world is a problem that has been widely acknowledged recently. However, different facets of this problem, or the reasons behind this disparity are seldom discussed within the NLP community. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the disparity that exists within the languages of the world. We show that simply categorising languages considering data availability may not be always correct. Using an existing language categorisation based on speaker population and vitality, we analyse the distribution of language data resources, amount of NLP/CL research, inclusion in multilingual web-based platforms and the inclusion in pre-trained multilingual models. We show that many languages do not get covered in these resources or platforms, and even within the languages belonging to the same language group, there is wide disparity. We analyse the impact of family, geographical location, GDP and the speaker population of languages and provide possible reasons for this disparity, along with some suggestions to overcome the same.
Anthology ID:
2022.aacl-main.62
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
November
Year:
2022
Address:
Online only
Editors:
Yulan He, Heng Ji, Sujian Li, Yang Liu, Chua-Hui Chang
Venues:
AACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
823–848
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.62
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Surangika Ranathunga and Nisansa de Silva. 2022. Some Languages are More Equal than Others: Probing Deeper into the Linguistic Disparity in the NLP World. In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 823–848, Online only. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Some Languages are More Equal than Others: Probing Deeper into the Linguistic Disparity in the NLP World (Ranathunga & de Silva, AACL-IJCNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.62.pdf