@inproceedings{goyal-2026-invisible,
title = "Invisible on the Web: An Audit of Low-Resource Muskogean Languages in Web-Crawled Corpora",
author = "Goyal, Sharvin",
editor = "Ortiz Suarez, Pedro and
Burchell, Laurie and
Ljube{\v{s}}i{\'c}, Nikola and
Scherrer, Yves and
Laippala, Veronika and
Dini{\'c}, Vuk and
Vaughan, Thom",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 13th Web-as-Corpus Workshop",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.wac-1.20/",
pages = "214--219",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-481-1",
abstract = "Web-crawled corpora now claim that they retain coverage of 1,000{--}2,000 languages, but what does such coverage mean for a language family at the extreme low-resource end? We audit the collective presence of the Muskogean family (Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee, Alabama, Koasati, Mikasuki) across seven major web corpora. Only two of the six languages appear in any corpus, and their entire kept content is 28 documents comprising 16 distinct texts, dominated by 19th-century Bible translations; a single document comes from a present-day language community. We exhaustively audit both the kept documents and the 15,108 discarded ones, showing that (i) language identification (LID) assigns Muskogean labels to short non-Muskogean fragments with up to 99.7{\%} persistence under re-identification, so quality filters, not LID, determine corpus content; (ii) those same filters discard about twice as many genuine Choctaw documents as they keep, including contemporary tribal-authored text; and (iii) four Muskogean languages are structurally invisible: no LID label exists, and verified Chickasaw text is silently absorbed into Choctaw. We release our audit annotations and seed-text URL list, and recommend family-level label sets, filter audits on the smallest subsets, and engagement with tribal data sovereignty for web corpus builders."
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<abstract>Web-crawled corpora now claim that they retain coverage of 1,000–2,000 languages, but what does such coverage mean for a language family at the extreme low-resource end? We audit the collective presence of the Muskogean family (Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee, Alabama, Koasati, Mikasuki) across seven major web corpora. Only two of the six languages appear in any corpus, and their entire kept content is 28 documents comprising 16 distinct texts, dominated by 19th-century Bible translations; a single document comes from a present-day language community. We exhaustively audit both the kept documents and the 15,108 discarded ones, showing that (i) language identification (LID) assigns Muskogean labels to short non-Muskogean fragments with up to 99.7% persistence under re-identification, so quality filters, not LID, determine corpus content; (ii) those same filters discard about twice as many genuine Choctaw documents as they keep, including contemporary tribal-authored text; and (iii) four Muskogean languages are structurally invisible: no LID label exists, and verified Chickasaw text is silently absorbed into Choctaw. We release our audit annotations and seed-text URL list, and recommend family-level label sets, filter audits on the smallest subsets, and engagement with tribal data sovereignty for web corpus builders.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Invisible on the Web: An Audit of Low-Resource Muskogean Languages in Web-Crawled Corpora
%A Goyal, Sharvin
%Y Ortiz Suarez, Pedro
%Y Burchell, Laurie
%Y Ljubešić, Nikola
%Y Scherrer, Yves
%Y Laippala, Veronika
%Y Dinić, Vuk
%Y Vaughan, Thom
%S Proceedings of the 13th Web-as-Corpus Workshop
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-481-1
%F goyal-2026-invisible
%X Web-crawled corpora now claim that they retain coverage of 1,000–2,000 languages, but what does such coverage mean for a language family at the extreme low-resource end? We audit the collective presence of the Muskogean family (Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee, Alabama, Koasati, Mikasuki) across seven major web corpora. Only two of the six languages appear in any corpus, and their entire kept content is 28 documents comprising 16 distinct texts, dominated by 19th-century Bible translations; a single document comes from a present-day language community. We exhaustively audit both the kept documents and the 15,108 discarded ones, showing that (i) language identification (LID) assigns Muskogean labels to short non-Muskogean fragments with up to 99.7% persistence under re-identification, so quality filters, not LID, determine corpus content; (ii) those same filters discard about twice as many genuine Choctaw documents as they keep, including contemporary tribal-authored text; and (iii) four Muskogean languages are structurally invisible: no LID label exists, and verified Chickasaw text is silently absorbed into Choctaw. We release our audit annotations and seed-text URL list, and recommend family-level label sets, filter audits on the smallest subsets, and engagement with tribal data sovereignty for web corpus builders.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.wac-1.20/
%P 214-219
Markdown (Informal)
[Invisible on the Web: An Audit of Low-Resource Muskogean Languages in Web-Crawled Corpora](https://aclanthology.org/2026.wac-1.20/) (Goyal, WAC 2026)
ACL