# Guylingo: The Republic of Guyana Creole Corpora

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.03832 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03832/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [What a Creole Wants, What a Creole Needs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00437/) (2022)
- [On Language Models for Creoles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06074/) (2021)
- [JamPatoisNLI: A Jamaican Patois Natural Language Inference Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03419/) (2022)
- [Ancestor-to-Creole Transfer is Not a Walk in the Park](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04371/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Limited-Resource Adapters Are Regularizers, Not Linguists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24525/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While major languages often enjoy substantial attention and resources, the linguistic diversity across the globe encompasses a multitude of smaller, indigenous, and regional languages that lack the same level of computational support. One such region is the Caribbean. While commonly labeled as "English speaking", the ex-British Caribbean region consists of a myriad of Creole languages thriving alongside English. In this paper, we present Guylingo: a comprehensive corpus designed for advancing NLP research in the domain of Creolese (Guyanese English-lexicon Creole), the most widely spoken language in the culturally rich nation of Guyana. We first outline our framework for gathering and digitizing this diverse corpus, inclusive of colloquial expressions, idioms, and regional variations in a low-resource language. We then demonstrate the challenges of training and evaluating NLP models for machine translation in Creole. Lastly, we discuss the unique opportunities presented by recent NLP advancements for accelerating the formal adoption of Creole languages as official languages in the Caribbean.