mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Some Languages are More Equal than Others: Probing Deeper into the Linguistic Disparity in the NLP World

arXiv 2210.08523 ↗First posted 16 Oct 2022cs.CLcited by 55

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Abstract (arXiv)

Linguistic disparity in the NLP world is a problem that has been widely acknowledged recently. However, different facets of this problem, or the reasons behind this disparity are seldom discussed within the NLP community. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the disparity that exists within the languages of the world. We show that simply categorising languages considering data availability may not be always correct. Using an existing language categorisation based on speaker population and vitality, we analyse the distribution of language data resources, amount of NLP/CL research, inclusion in multilingual web-based platforms and the inclusion in pre-trained multilingual models. We show that many languages do not get covered in these resources or platforms, and even within the languages belonging to the same language group, there is wide disparity. We analyse the impact of family, geographical location, GDP and the speaker population of languages and provide possible reasons for this disparity, along with some suggestions to overcome the same.

Key facts. Cited by 55 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 20 of its 69 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2022.

Builds on

20 of 69 references.

References · 20

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
  2. 2019Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scalecited by 3,907
  3. 2018XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representationscited by 913
  4. 2020The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP Worldcited by 789
  5. 2020XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalizationcited by 738
  6. 2021Quality at a Glance: An Audit of Web-Crawled Multilingual Datasetscited by 241
  7. 2020Are All Languages Created Equal in Multilingual BERT?cited by 206
  8. 2020A Survey on Recent Approaches for Natural Language Processing in Low-Resource Scenarioscited by 170
  9. 2020When Being Unseen from mBERT is just the Beginning: Handling New Languages With Multilingual Language Modelscited by 131
  10. 2021Systematic Inequalities in Language Technology Performance across the World's Languagescited by 118
  11. 2021Neural Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages: A Surveycited by 108
  12. 2022Building Machine Translation Systems for the Next Thousand Languagescited by 69
8 more
  1. 2019The FLoRes Evaluation Datasets for Low-Resource Machine Translation: Nepali-English and Sinhala-Englishcited by 61
  2. 2021AmericasNLI: Evaluating Zero-shot Natural Language Understanding of Pretrained Multilingual Models in Truly Low-resource Languagescited by 50
  3. 2019Survey on Publicly Available Sinhala Natural Language Processing Tools and Researchcited by 45
  4. 2021Dataset Geography: Mapping Language Data to Language Userscited by 22
  5. 2022BERTifying Sinhala -- A Comprehensive Analysis of Pre-trained Language Models for Sinhala Text Classificationcited by 15
  6. 2019Keyphrase Extraction from Disaster-related Tweetscited by 12
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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2022: 1; 2023: 5; 2024: 14; 2025: 18; 2026: 17.

55 papers.

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  1. 2024Why do language models perform worse for morphologically complex languages?cited by 62
  2. 2024Can LLMs Really Learn to Translate a Low-Resource Language from One Grammar Book?cited by 23
  3. 2025One ruler to measure them all: Benchmarking multilingual long-context language modelscited by 18
  4. 2023The ACL OCL Corpus: Advancing Open Science in Computational Linguisticscited by 16
  5. 2024What Drives Performance in Multilingual Language Models?cited by 14
  6. 2026Tiny Aya: Bridging Scale and Multilingual Depthcited by 14
  7. 2024Quality Does Matter: A Detailed Look at the Quality and Utility of Web-Mined Parallel Corporacited by 13
  8. 2023Preparing the Vuk'uzenzele and ZA-gov-multilingual South African multilingual corporacited by 12
  9. 2024The Call for Socially Aware Language Technologiescited by 12
  10. 2024ZAEBUC-Spoken: A Multilingual Multidialectal Arabic-English Speech Corpuscited by 10
  11. 2025The Multilingual Divide and Its Impact on Global AI Safetycited by 10
  12. 2025Zero-shot OCR Accuracy of Low-Resourced Languages: A Comparative Analysis on Sinhala and Tamilcited by 9
38 more
  1. 2025SinLlama -- A Large Language Model for Sinhalacited by 8
  2. 2022Too Brittle To Touch: Comparing the Stability of Quantization and Distillation Towards Developing Lightweight Low-Resource MT Modelscited by 5
  3. 2025The Art of Asking: Multilingual Prompt Optimization for Synthetic Datacited by 5
  4. 2026When Meanings Meet: Investigating the Emergence and Quality of Shared Concept Spaces during Multilingual Language Model Trainingcited by 5
  5. 2023Sinhala-English Parallel Word Dictionary Datasetcited by 4
  6. 2024Do Language Models Care About Text Quality? Evaluating Web-Crawled Corpora Across 11 Languagescited by 4
  7. 2024Shoulders of Giants: A Look at the Degree and Utility of Openness in NLP Researchcited by 4
  8. 2025Large Multimodal Models for Low-Resource Languages: A Surveycited by 4
  9. 2024SiTSE: Sinhala Text Simplification Dataset and Evaluationcited by 3
  10. 2025Improving the quality of Web-mined Parallel Corpora of Low-Resource Languages using Debiasing Heuristicscited by 3
  11. 2025A Survey on Multilingual Mental Disorders Detection from Social Media Datacited by 3
  12. 2026Artificial intelligence is creating a new global linguistic hierarchycited by 3
  13. 2023Exploring the Maze of Multilingual Modelingcited by 2
  14. 2024Exploiting Domain-Specific Parallel Data on Multilingual Language Models for Low-resource Language Translationcited by 2
  15. 2025LAG-MMLU: Benchmarking Frontier LLM Understanding in Latvian and Giriamacited by 2
  16. 2025NLP Security and Ethics, in the Wildcited by 2
  17. 2025SiDiaC: Sinhala Diachronic Corpuscited by 2
  18. 2026The Culture Funnel: You Can't Align What isn't in the Datacited by 2
  19. 2023Sinhala-English Word Embedding Alignment: Introducing Datasets and Benchmark for a Low Resource Languagecited by 1
  20. 2024A global AI community requires language-diverse publishingcited by 1
  21. 2024A Multi-way Parallel Named Entity Annotated Corpus for English, Tamil and Sinhalacited by 1
  22. 2025Linguistic Entity Masking to Improve Cross-Lingual Representation of Multilingual Language Models for Low-Resource Languagescited by 1
  23. 2025A Framework to Assess Multilingual Vulnerabilities of LLMscited by 1
  24. 2025ScheduleMe: Multi-Agent Calendar Assistantcited by 1
  25. 2025Zoom In Disparities in Healthcare LLM Q&Acited by 1
  26. 2026SinFoS: A Parallel Dataset for Translating Sinhala Figures of Speechcited by 1
  27. 2026SiDiaC-v.2.0: Sinhala Diachronic Corpus Version 2.0cited by 1
  28. 2026EnSiTa - A Trilingual Multi-Domain Parallel Dataset and Benchmark for Domain-Specific Machine Translationcited by 1
  29. 2024Collaborative Participatory Research with LLM Agents in South Asia: An Empirically-Grounded Methodological Initiative and Agenda from Field Evidence in Sri Lankacited by 0
  30. 2024Unsupervised Bilingual Lexicon Induction for Low Resource Languagescited by 0
  31. 2025Zero-shot Performance of Generative AI in Brazilian Portuguese Medical Examcited by 0
  32. 2025How Good is BLI as an Alignment Measure: A Study in Word Embedding Paradigmcited by 0
  33. 2025LMSpell: Spell Correction with Pre-Trained Language Modelscited by 0
  34. 2026Script Sensitivity: Benchmarking Language Models on Unicode, Romanized and Mixed-Script Sinhalacited by 0
  35. 2026Sinhala Physical Common Sense Reasoning Dataset for Global PIQAcited by 0
  36. 2026OasisSimp: An Open-source Asian-English Sentence Simplification Datasetcited by 0
  37. 2026SiPaKosa: A Comprehensive Corpus of Canonical and Classical Buddhist Texts in Sinhala and Palicited by 0
  38. 2026Beyond Catalogue Counts: the Dataset Visibility Asymmetry in Low-Resource Multilingual NLPcited by 0

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