# Mining Wikidata for Name Resources for African Languages

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.00558 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00558/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 7 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Soft Gazetteers for Low-Resource Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01866/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [KinyaBERT: a Morphology-aware Kinyarwanda Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08459/) (2022)
- [State of NLP in Kenya: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09948/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work supports further development of language technology for the languages of Africa by providing a Wikidata-derived resource of name lists corresponding to common entity types (person, location, and organization). While we are not the first to mine Wikidata for name lists, our approach emphasizes scalability and replicability and addresses data quality issues for languages that do not use Latin scripts. We produce lists containing approximately 1.9 million names across 28 African languages. We describe the data, the process used to produce it, and its limitations, and provide the software and data for public use. Finally, we discuss the ethical considerations of producing this resource and others of its kind.