Yinkai Wang


2022

pdf bib
Dataset Geography: Mapping Language Data to Language Users
Fahim Faisal | Yinkai Wang | Antonios Anastasopoulos
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

As language technologies become more ubiquitous, there are increasing efforts towards expanding the language diversity and coverage of natural language processing (NLP) systems. Arguably, the most important factor influencing the quality of modern NLP systems is data availability. In this work, we study the geographical representativeness of NLP datasets, aiming to quantify if and by how much do NLP datasets match the expected needs of the language speakers. In doing so, we use entity recognition and linking systems, also making important observations about their cross-lingual consistency and giving suggestions for more robust evaluation. Last, we explore some geographical and economic factors that may explain the observed dataset distributions.