# Multilingual Open Text Release 1: Public Domain News in 44 Languages

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.05609 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05609/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09095/) (2020)
- [Stanza: A Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit for Many Human Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07082/) (2020)
- [MAD-X: An Adapter-Based Framework for Multi-Task Cross-Lingual Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00052/) (2020)
- [Quality at a Glance: An Audit of Web-Crawled Multilingual Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12028/) (2021)
- [WikiMatrix: Mining 135M Parallel Sentences in 1620 Language Pairs from Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05791/) (2019)
- [MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11811/) (2021)
- [CCAligned: A Massive Collection of Cross-Lingual Web-Document Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06154/) (2019)
- [A Monolingual Approach to Contextualized Word Embeddings for Mid-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06202/) (2020)
- [KINNEWS and KIRNEWS: Benchmarking Cross-Lingual Text Classification for Kinyarwanda and Kirundi](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12174/) (2020)
- [Introducing various Semantic Models for Amharic: Experimentation and Evaluation with multiple Tasks and Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01154/) (2020)
- [Manually Annotated Spelling Error Corpus for Amharic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13521/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Glot500: Scaling Multilingual Corpora and Language Models to 500 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12182/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Multilingual Large Language Models: Corpora, Alignment, and Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00929/) (2024)
- [SILO Language Models: Isolating Legal Risk In a Nonparametric Datastore](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04430/) (2023)
- [Goldfish: Monolingual Language Models for 350 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10441/) (2024)
- [MasakhaPOS: Part-of-Speech Tagging for Typologically Diverse African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13989/) (2023)
- [EMMA-500: Enhancing Massively Multilingual Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17892/) (2024)
- [SSA-COMET: Do LLMs Outperform Learned Metrics in Evaluating MT for Under-Resourced African Languages?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04557/) (2025)
- [LR-Sum: Summarization for Less-Resourced Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09674/) (2022)
- [Extended Multilingual Protest News Detection -- Shared Task 1, CASE 2021 and 2022](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11360/) (2022)
- [Comparing Approaches to Automatic Summarization in Less-Resourced Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24410/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present Multilingual Open Text (MOT), a new multilingual corpus containing text in 44 languages, many of which have limited existing text resources for natural language processing. The first release of the corpus contains over 2.8 million news articles and an additional 1 million short snippets (photo captions, video descriptions, etc.) published between 2001--2022 and collected from Voice of America's news websites. We describe our process for collecting, filtering, and processing the data. The source material is in the public domain, our collection is licensed using a creative commons license (CC BY 4.0), and all software used to create the corpus is released under the MIT License. The corpus will be regularly updated as additional documents are published.