# One Country, 700+ Languages: NLP Challenges for Underrepresented Languages and Dialects in Indonesia

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.13357 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13357/

## Key facts

- Cited by 66 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 69 of its 213 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 69)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [Don't Stop Pretraining: Adapt Language Models to Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10964/) (2020)
- [TinyBERT: Distilling BERT for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10351/) (2019)
- [Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08210/) (2020)
- [Bag of Tricks for Efficient Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01759/) (2016)
- [Analyzing Multi-Head Self-Attention: Specialized Heads Do the Heavy Lifting, the Rest Can Be Pruned](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09418/) (2019)
- [The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09095/) (2020)
- [XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11080/) (2020)
- [Subword Regularization: Improving Neural Network Translation Models with Multiple Subword Candidates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10959/) (2018)
- [Green AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10597/) (2019)
- [On the Cross-lingual Transferability of Monolingual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11856/) (2019)
- [ByT5: Towards a token-free future with pre-trained byte-to-byte models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13626/) (2021)
- [TyDi QA: A Benchmark for Information-Seeking Question Answering in Typologically Diverse Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05002/) (2020)
- [XL-Sum: Large-Scale Multilingual Abstractive Summarization for 44 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13822/) (2021)
- [XCOPA: A Multilingual Dataset for Causal Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00333/) (2020)
- [Sparse Communication for Distributed Gradient Descent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05021/) (2017)
- [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)
- [How Many Data Points is a Prompt Worth?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08493/) (2021)
- [Visually Grounded Reasoning across Languages and Cultures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13238/) (2021)
- [MuRIL: Multilingual Representations for Indian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10730/) (2021)
- [Charformer: Fast Character Transformers via Gradient-based Subword Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12672/) (2021)
- [mMARCO: A Multilingual Version of the MS MARCO Passage Ranking Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13897/) (2021)
- [IndoNLU: Benchmark and Resources for Evaluating Indonesian Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.05387/) (2020)
- [Towards end-to-end spoken language understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08395/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-shot Multilingual Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07684/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Code-switched Speech and Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00784/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04023/) (2023)
- [Bactrian-X: Multilingual Replicable Instruction-Following Models with Low-Rank Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15011/) (2023)
- [NusaX: Multilingual Parallel Sentiment Dataset for 10 Indonesian Local Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15960/) (2022)
- [BUFFET: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Few-shot Cross-lingual Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14857/) (2023)
- [LLMs Are Few-Shot In-Context Low-Resource Language Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16512/) (2024)
- [Prompting Multilingual Large Language Models to Generate Code-Mixed Texts: The Case of South East Asian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13592/) (2023)
- [Multi-lingual and Multi-cultural Figurative Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16171/) (2023)
- [SEACrowd: A Multilingual Multimodal Data Hub and Benchmark Suite for Southeast Asian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10118/) (2024)
- [SERENGETI: Massively Multilingual Language Models for Africa](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10785/) (2022)
- [Natural Language Processing for Dialects of a Language: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05632/) (2024)
- [IndoCulture: Exploring Geographically-Influenced Cultural Commonsense Reasoning Across Eleven Indonesian Provinces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01854/) (2024)
- [NusaCrowd: Open Source Initiative for Indonesian NLP Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09648/) (2022)
- [Can LLM Generate Culturally Relevant Commonsense QA Data? Case Study in Indonesian and Sundanese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17302/) (2024)
- [SeaLLMs 3: Open Foundation and Chat Multilingual Large Language Models for Southeast Asian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19672/) (2024)
- [The Decades Progress on Code-Switching Research in NLP: A Systematic Survey on Trends and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09660/) (2022)
- [Quantifying the Dialect Gap and its Correlates Across Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15135/) (2023)
- [Improving Machine Translation with Human Feedback: An Exploration of Quality Estimation as a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12873/) (2024)
- [InstructAlign: High-and-Low Resource Language Alignment via Continual Crosslingual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13627/) (2023)
- [A Material Lens on Coloniality in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08391/) (2023)
- [Fairness in Language Models Beyond English: Gaps and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12578/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Corpora for Germanic Low-Resource Languages and Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09805/) (2023)
- [Representativeness as a Forgotten Lesson for Multilingual and Code-switched Data Collection and Preparation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20470/) (2023)
- [What makes a language easy to deep-learn? Deep neural networks and humans similarly benefit from compositional structure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12239/) (2023)
- [Voices Unheard: NLP Resources and Models for Yor`ub'a Regional Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19564/) (2024)
- [The Multilingual Divide and Its Impact on Global AI Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21344/) (2025)
- [Crowdsource, Crawl, or Generate? Creating SEA-VL, a Multicultural Vision-Language Dataset for Southeast Asia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07920/) (2025)
- [HKCanto-Eval: A Benchmark for Evaluating Cantonese Language Understanding and Cultural Comprehension in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12440/) (2025)
- [Multilingual Relation Classification via Efficient and Effective Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13838/) (2022)
- [Linguistics Theory Meets LLM: Code-Switched Text Generation via Equivalence Constrained Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22660/) (2024)
- [LoraxBench: A Multitask, Multilingual Benchmark Suite for 20 Indonesian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12459/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

NLP research is impeded by a lack of resources and awareness of the challenges presented by underrepresented languages and dialects. Focusing on the languages spoken in Indonesia, the second most linguistically diverse and the fourth most populous nation of the world, we provide an overview of the current state of NLP research for Indonesia's 700+ languages. We highlight challenges in Indonesian NLP and how these affect the performance of current NLP systems. Finally, we provide general recommendations to help develop NLP technology not only for languages of Indonesia but also other underrepresented languages.