GlotLID: Language Identification for Low-Resource Languages

Amir Kargaran, Ayyoob Imani, François Yvon, Hinrich Schuetze


Abstract
Several recent papers have published good solutions for language identification (LID) for about 300 high-resource and medium-resource languages. However, there is no LID available that (i) covers a wide range of low-resource languages, (ii) is rigorously evaluated and reliable and (iii) efficient and easy to use. Here, we publish GlotLID-M, an LID model that satisfies the desiderata of wide coverage, reliability and efficiency. It identifies 1665 languages, a large increase in coverage compared to prior work. In our experiments, GlotLID-M outperforms four baselines (CLD3, FT176, OpenLID and NLLB) when balancing F1 and false positive rate (FPR). We analyze the unique challenges that low-resource LID poses: incorrect corpus metadata, leakage from high-resource languages, difficulty separating closely related languages, handling of macrolanguage vs varieties and in general noisy data. We hope that integrating GlotLID-M into dataset creation pipelines will improve quality and enhance accessibility of NLP technology for low-resource languages and cultures. GlotLID-M model, code, and list of data sources are available: https://github.com/cisnlp/GlotLID.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.410
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6155–6218
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.410
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.410
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Amir Kargaran, Ayyoob Imani, François Yvon, and Hinrich Schuetze. 2023. GlotLID: Language Identification for Low-Resource Languages. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 6155–6218, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
GlotLID: Language Identification for Low-Resource Languages (Kargaran et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.410.pdf