# Bloom Library: Multimodal Datasets in 300+ Languages for a Variety of Downstream Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.14712 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14712/

## Key facts

- Cited by 28 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [Bag of Tricks for Efficient Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01759/) (2016)
- [OFA: Unifying Architectures, Tasks, and Modalities Through a Simple Sequence-to-Sequence Learning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03052/) (2022)
- [XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09296/) (2021)
- [Multi30K: Multilingual English-German Image Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.00459/) (2016)
- [Quality at a Glance: An Audit of Web-Crawled Multilingual Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12028/) (2021)
- [RedCaps: web-curated image-text data created by the people, for the people](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11431/) (2021)
- [Visual Storytelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03968/) (2016)
- [MASSIVE: A 1M-Example Multilingual Natural Language Understanding Dataset with 51 Typologically-Diverse Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08582/) (2022)
- [Systematic Inequalities in Language Technology Performance across the World's Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06733/) (2021)
- [Pano-AVQA: Grounded Audio-Visual Question Answering on 360^circ Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05122/) (2021)
- [Findings of the Second Shared Task on Multimodal Machine Translation and Multilingual Image Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.07177/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Scaling Speech Technology to 1,000+ Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13516/) (2023)
- [MADLAD-400: A Multilingual And Document-Level Large Audited Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04662/) (2023)
- [Glot500: Scaling Multilingual Corpora and Language Models to 500 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12182/) (2023)
- [LLMs Are Few-Shot In-Context Low-Resource Language Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16512/) (2024)
- [SEACrowd: A Multilingual Multimodal Data Hub and Benchmark Suite for Southeast Asian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10118/) (2024)
- [An image speaks a thousand words, but can everyone listen? On image transcreation for cultural relevance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01247/) (2024)
- [This Land is {Your, My} Land: Evaluating Geopolitical Biases in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14610/) (2023)
- [Goldfish: Monolingual Language Models for 350 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10441/) (2024)
- [GlotCC: An Open Broad-Coverage CommonCrawl Corpus and Pipeline for Minority Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23825/) (2024)
- [Charting the Landscape of African NLP: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Ahead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21315/) (2025)
- [The Zeno's Paradox of `Low-Resource' Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20817/) (2024)
- [SMOL: Professionally translated parallel data for 115 under-represented languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12301/) (2025)
- [BIG-C: a Multimodal Multi-Purpose Dataset for Bemba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17202/) (2023)
- [mOSCAR: A Large-scale Multilingual and Multimodal Document-level Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08707/) (2024)
- [Crowdsource, Crawl, or Generate? Creating SEA-VL, a Multicultural Vision-Language Dataset for Southeast Asia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07920/) (2025)
- [State of NLP in Kenya: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09948/) (2024)
- [Continually Adding New Languages to Multilingual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11414/) (2025)
- [LIMIT: Language Identification, Misidentification, and Translation using Hierarchical Models in 350+ Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14263/) (2023)
- [DCAD-2000: A Multilingual Dataset across 2000+ Languages with Data Cleaning as Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11546/) (2025)
- [DIVERS-Bench: Evaluating Language Identification Across Domain Shifts and Code-Switching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17768/) (2025)
- [Is Information Density Uniform when Utterances are Grounded on Perception and Discourse?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14653/) (2026)
- [SingaKids: A Multilingual Multimodal Dialogic Tutor for Language Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02412/) (2025)
- [Multi-dimensional data refining strategy for effective fine-tuning LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01049/) (2023)
- [Revealing Trends in Datasets from the 2022 ACL and EMNLP Conferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08666/) (2024)
- [AfroScope: A Framework for Studying the Linguistic Landscape of Africa](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13346/) (2026)
- [Can Linguistically Related Languages Guide LLM Translation in Low-Resource Settings?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16660/) (2026)
- [SEA-SpeechBench: A Large-Scale Multitask Benchmark for Speech Understanding Across Southeast Asia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.09672/) (2026)
- [SEA-CLIP-Tiny: Efficient Multilingual Text-Vision Embedding for Southeast Asian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30739/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present Bloom Library, a linguistically diverse set of multimodal and multilingual datasets for language modeling, image captioning, visual storytelling, and speech synthesis/recognition. These datasets represent either the most, or among the most, multilingual datasets for each of the included downstream tasks. In total, the initial release of the Bloom Library datasets covers 363 languages across 32 language families. We train downstream task models for various languages represented in the data, showing the viability of the data for future work in low-resource, multimodal NLP and establishing the first known baselines for these downstream tasks in certain languages (e.g., Bisu [bzi], with an estimated population of 700 users). Some of these first-of-their-kind baselines are comparable to state-of-the-art performance for higher-resourced languages. The Bloom Library datasets are released under Creative Commons licenses on the Hugging Face datasets hub to catalyze more linguistically diverse research in the included downstream tasks.