# What a Creole Wants, What a Creole Needs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.00437 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00437/

## Key facts

- Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05053/) (2018)
- [The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09095/) (2020)
- [On the Cross-lingual Transferability of Monolingual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11856/) (2019)
- [Visually Grounded Reasoning across Languages and Cultures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13238/) (2021)
- [Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02353/) (2020)
- [MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11811/) (2021)
- [Distributionally Robust Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02060/) (2019)
- [Translation Artifacts in Cross-lingual Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04721/) (2020)
- [NaijaSenti: A Nigerian Twitter Sentiment Corpus for Multilingual Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08277/) (2022)
- [Mind Your Inflections! Improving NLP for Non-Standard Englishes with Base-Inflection Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14870/) (2020)
- [A Large-Scale Study of Machine Translation in the Turkic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04593/) (2021)
- [On Language Models for Creoles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06074/) (2021)
- [Semantic Enrichment of Nigerian Pidgin English for Contextual Sentiment Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12450/) (2020)
- [PidginUNMT: Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation from West African Pidgin to English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03444/) (2019)
- [Universal Dependencies Parsing for Colloquial Singaporean English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06463/) (2017)
- [NaijaNER : Comprehensive Named Entity Recognition for 5 Nigerian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00810/) (2021)
- [Towards Supervised and Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation Baselines for Nigerian Pidgin](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12660/) (2020)
- [Towards End-to-End Training of Automatic Speech Recognition for Nigerian Pidgin](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11123/) (2020)
- [Developing a concept-level knowledge base for sentiment analysis in Singlish](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.04408/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Language Model Tokenizers Introduce Unfairness Between Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15425/) (2023)
- [Aya Dataset: An Open-Access Collection for Multilingual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06619/) (2024)
- [RLHF Can Speak Many Languages: Unlocking Multilingual Preference Optimization for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02552/) (2024)
- [A Material Lens on Coloniality in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08391/) (2023)
- [What Do Dialect Speakers Want? A Survey of Attitudes Towards Language Technology for German Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11968/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Corpora for Germanic Low-Resource Languages and Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09805/) (2023)
- [The AI Gap: How Socioeconomic Status Affects Language Technology Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12158/) (2025)
- [JamPatoisNLI: A Jamaican Patois Natural Language Inference Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03419/) (2022)
- [Krey`ol-MT: Building MT for Latin American, Caribbean and Colonial African Creole Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05376/) (2024)
- [CreoleVal: Multilingual Multitask Benchmarks for Creoles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19567/) (2023)
- [How Good are Commercial Large Language Models on African Languages?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06530/) (2023)
- [Does Generative AI speak Nigerian-Pidgin?: Issues about Representativeness and Bias for Multilingualism in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19442/) (2024)
- [Low-resource Machine Translation: what for? who for? An observational study on a dedicated Tetun language translation service](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12262/) (2024)
- [Building Better: Avoiding Pitfalls in Developing Language Resources when Data is Scarce](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12691/) (2024)
- [Designing Speech Technologies for Australian Aboriginal English: Opportunities, Risks and Participation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03186/) (2025)
- [What Do Indonesians Really Need from Language Technology? A Nationwide Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07506/) (2025)
- [Towards a general purpose machine translation system for Sranantongo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06383/) (2022)
- [NLP Security and Ethics, in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06669/) (2025)
- [Beyond Weaponization: NLP Security for Medium and Lower-Resourced Languages in Their Own Right](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03473/) (2025)
- [Guylingo: The Republic of Guyana Creole Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03832/) (2024)
- [Moly'e: A Corpus-based Approach to Language Contact in Colonial France](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04554/) (2024)
- [Kr'eyoLID From Language Identification Towards Language Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06547/) (2025)
- [Deconstructing Jazz Piano Style Using Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05009/) (2025)
- [Limited-Resource Adapters Are Regularizers, Not Linguists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24525/) (2025)
- [Saar-Voice: A Multi-Speaker Saarbr"ucken Dialect Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11803/) (2026)
- [Beyond Good Intentions: When Does the Framing of Multilingual and Low-Resource NLP Research Become a Caricature?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30866/) (2026)
- [The University of Melbourne WMT 2026 CreoleMT Submission: A Domain-Balanced Approach to Low-Resource Pacific Creole Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13615/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, the natural language processing (NLP) community has given increased attention to the disparity of efforts directed towards high-resource languages over low-resource ones. Efforts to remedy this delta often begin with translations of existing English datasets into other languages. However, this approach ignores that different language communities have different needs. We consider a group of low-resource languages, Creole languages. Creoles are both largely absent from the NLP literature, and also often ignored by society at large due to stigma, despite these languages having sizable and vibrant communities. We demonstrate, through conversations with Creole experts and surveys of Creole-speaking communities, how the things needed from language technology can change dramatically from one language to another, even when the languages are considered to be very similar to each other, as with Creoles. We discuss the prominent themes arising from these conversations, and ultimately demonstrate that useful language technology cannot be built without involving the relevant community.