mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World

arXiv 2004.09095 ↗First posted 20 Apr 2020cs.CLcited by 789

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Abstract (arXiv)

Language technologies contribute to promoting multilingualism and linguistic diversity around the world. However, only a very small number of the over 7000 languages of the world are represented in the rapidly evolving language technologies and applications. In this paper we look at the relation between the types of languages, resources, and their representation in NLP conferences to understand the trajectory that different languages have followed over time. Our quantitative investigation underlines the disparity between languages, especially in terms of their resources, and calls into question the "language agnostic" status of current models and systems. Through this paper, we attempt to convince the ACL community to prioritise the resolution of the predicaments highlighted here, so that no language is left behind.

Key facts. Cited by 789 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 20 Apr 2020.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 71; 2022: 99; 2023: 109; 2024: 143; 2025: 188; 2026: 179.

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  1. 2021Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Modelscited by 957
  2. 2023A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivitycited by 888
  3. 2023Towards Measuring the Representation of Subjective Global Opinions in Language Modelscited by 424
  4. 2023The Belebele Benchmark: a Parallel Reading Comprehension Dataset in 122 Language Variantscited by 300
  5. 2024Aya Model: An Instruction Finetuned Open-Access Multilingual Language Modelcited by 292
  6. 2023MEGA: Multilingual Evaluation of Generative AIcited by 291
  7. 2023Low-Resource Languages Jailbreak GPT-4cited by 290
  8. 2021The GEM Benchmark: Natural Language Generation, its Evaluation and Metricscited by 239
  9. 2022Challenges and Strategies in Cross-Cultural NLPcited by 216
  10. 2023Language Model Tokenizers Introduce Unfairness Between Languagescited by 207
  11. 2023MADLAD-400: A Multilingual And Document-Level Large Audited Datasetcited by 180
  12. 2024Aya Dataset: An Open-Access Collection for Multilingual Instruction Tuningcited by 174
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  1. 2024BLEnD: A Benchmark for LLMs on Everyday Knowledge in Diverse Cultures and Languagescited by 171
  2. 2021Challenges in Detoxifying Language Modelscited by 169
  3. 2021Alignment of Language Agentscited by 167
  4. 2021XTREME-R: Towards More Challenging and Nuanced Multilingual Evaluationcited by 167
  5. 2022Repairing the Cracked Foundation: A Survey of Obstacles in Evaluation Practices for Generated Textcited by 154
  6. 2023SIB-200: A Simple, Inclusive, and Big Evaluation Dataset for Topic Classification in 200+ Languages and Dialectscited by 149
  7. 2021BanglaBERT: Language Model Pretraining and Benchmarks for Low-Resource Language Understanding Evaluation in Banglacited by 123
  8. 2021Systematic Inequalities in Language Technology Performance across the World's Languagescited by 118
  9. 2023Glot500: Scaling Multilingual Corpora and Language Models to 500 Languagescited by 116
  10. 2021XLM-T: Multilingual Language Models in Twitter for Sentiment Analysis and Beyondcited by 114
  11. 2021Neural Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages: A Surveycited by 108
  12. 2022Towards Leaving No Indic Language Behind: Building Monolingual Corpora, Benchmark and Models for Indic Languagescited by 99
  13. 2022A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way! Leveraging Pre-trained Models for African News Translationcited by 97
  14. 2024LLaMA Beyond English: An Empirical Study on Language Capability Transfercited by 94
  15. 2021Learning Compact Metrics for MTcited by 93
  16. 2023Language Model Behavior: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 92
  17. 2023The unreasonable effectiveness of few-shot learning for machine translationcited by 91
  18. 2023NLPositionality: Characterizing Design Biases of Datasets and Modelscited by 91
  19. 2022BLOOM+1: Adding Language Support to BLOOM for Zero-Shot Promptingcited by 90
  20. 2023Are Large Language Model-based Evaluators the Solution to Scaling Up Multilingual Evaluation?cited by 87
  21. 2024HumanEval-XL: A Multilingual Code Generation Benchmark for Cross-lingual Natural Language Generalizationcited by 84
  22. 2023Better to Ask in English: Cross-Lingual Evaluation of Large Language Models for Healthcare Queriescited by 82
  23. 2022Language Generation Models Can Cause Harm: So What Can We Do About It? An Actionable Surveycited by 80
  24. 2024INCLUDE: Evaluating Multilingual Language Understanding with Regional Knowledgecited by 78
  25. 2024SafetyPrompts: a Systematic Review of Open Datasets for Evaluating and Improving Large Language Model Safetycited by 75
  26. 2024Understanding and Mitigating Language Confusion in LLMscited by 75
  27. 2021A Survey of Race, Racism, and Anti-Racism in NLPcited by 74
  28. 2023YouTube-ASL: A Large-Scale, Open-Domain American Sign Language-English Parallel Corpuscited by 74
  29. 2023A Benchmark for Learning to Translate a New Language from One Grammar Bookcited by 74
  30. 2025MMLU-ProX: A Multilingual Benchmark for Advanced Large Language Model Evaluationcited by 73
  31. 2023BUFFET: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Few-shot Cross-lingual Transfercited by 68
  32. 2022One Country, 700+ Languages: NLP Challenges for Underrepresented Languages and Dialects in Indonesiacited by 65
  33. 2022NaijaSenti: A Nigerian Twitter Sentiment Corpus for Multilingual Sentiment Analysiscited by 64
  34. 2022POTATO: The Portable Text Annotation Toolcited by 64
  35. 2021What to Pre-Train on? Efficient Intermediate Task Selectioncited by 62
  36. 2024Why do language models perform worse for morphologically complex languages?cited by 62
  37. 2021Distributed Deep Learning in Open Collaborationscited by 58
  38. 2023MEGAVERSE: Benchmarking Large Language Models Across Languages, Modalities, Models and Taskscited by 57

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