# NusaWrites: Constructing High-Quality Corpora for Underrepresented and Extremely Low-Resource Languages

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10661 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10661/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08207/) (2021)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08210/) (2020)
- [XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05053/) (2018)
- [A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04023/) (2023)
- [XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11080/) (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)
- [KLUE: Korean Language Understanding Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09680/) (2021)
- [IndoNLU: Benchmark and Resources for Evaluating Indonesian Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.05387/) (2020)
- [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)
- [One Country, 700+ Languages: NLP Challenges for Underrepresented Languages and Dialects in Indonesia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13357/) (2022)
- [Multilingual Large Language Models Are Not (Yet) Code-Switchers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14235/) (2023)
- [IndoLEM and IndoBERT: A Benchmark Dataset and Pre-trained Language Model for Indonesian NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00677/) (2020)
- [IndoNLG: Benchmark and Resources for Evaluating Indonesian Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08200/) (2021)
- [Prompting Multilingual Large Language Models to Generate Code-Mixed Texts: The Case of South East Asian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13592/) (2023)
- [AmericasNLI: Evaluating Zero-shot Natural Language Understanding of Pretrained Multilingual Models in Truly Low-resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08726/) (2021)
- [Multi-lingual and Multi-cultural Figurative Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16171/) (2023)
- [IndicNLG Benchmark: Multilingual Datasets for Diverse NLG Tasks in Indic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05437/) (2022)
- [NusaCrowd: Open Source Initiative for Indonesian NLP Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09648/) (2022)
- [GEMv2: Multilingual NLG Benchmarking in a Single Line of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11249/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [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)
- [LoraxBench: A Multitask, Multilingual Benchmark Suite for 20 Indonesian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12459/) (2025)
- [What Do Indonesians Really Need from Language Technology? A Nationwide Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07506/) (2025)
- [Does System One Transfer? Calibrated Typed-Decision Models, Label Budgets, and Translation for Indonesian Regional Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14112/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Democratizing access to natural language processing (NLP) technology is crucial, especially for underrepresented and extremely low-resource languages. Previous research has focused on developing labeled and unlabeled corpora for these languages through online scraping and document translation. While these methods have proven effective and cost-efficient, we have identified limitations in the resulting corpora, including a lack of lexical diversity and cultural relevance to local communities. To address this gap, we conduct a case study on Indonesian local languages. We compare the effectiveness of online scraping, human translation, and paragraph writing by native speakers in constructing datasets. Our findings demonstrate that datasets generated through paragraph writing by native speakers exhibit superior quality in terms of lexical diversity and cultural content. In addition, we present the datasetname benchmark, encompassing 12 underrepresented and extremely low-resource languages spoken by millions of individuals in Indonesia. Our empirical experiment results using existing multilingual large language models conclude the need to extend these models to more underrepresented languages. We release the NusaWrites dataset at https://github.com/IndoNLP/nusa-writes.