# Beyond Catalogue Counts: the Dataset Visibility Asymmetry in Low-Resource Multilingual NLP

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17442 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17442/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14050/) (2020)
- [The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09095/) (2020)
- [Data and its (dis)contents: A survey of dataset development and use in machine learning research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05345/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Recent Approaches for Natural Language Processing in Low-Resource Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12309/) (2020)
- [Some Languages are More Equal than Others: Probing Deeper into the Linguistic Disparity in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08523/) (2022)
- [NusaCrowd: Open Source Initiative for Indonesian NLP Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09648/) (2022)
- [Beyond Counting Datasets: A Survey of Multilingual Dataset Construction and Necessary Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15649/) (2022)
- [The Zeno's Paradox of `Low-Resource' Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20817/) (2024)
- [Lanfrica: A Participatory Approach to Documenting Machine Translation Research on African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07302/) (2020)
- [Multi-Disciplinary Dataset Discovery from Citation-Verified Literature Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05099/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multilingual NLP often relies on dataset counts from centralized catalogues to characterize which languages are resource-rich or resource-poor. However, these catalogues record only one layer of dataset visibility: what has been registered or institutionally distributed. They do not necessarily reflect which datasets are created, cited, or reused in the research literature. To examine this gap, we combine a catalogue-based baseline with literature-backed evidence of dataset circulation. We introduce the Resource Density Index (RDI), defined as the number of catalogued datasets per one million speakers, and compute it for the 200 most widely spoken languages in Ethnologue. Among them, 118 languages (59%) have an average RDI of zero across the LRE Map and the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), and another 23 fall below 0.1, corresponding to at most one catalogued dataset per ten million speakers. We then apply an LLM-assisted citation-mining pipeline over the Semantic Scholar corpus to these 141 low-visibility languages. After manual validation and consolidation, we identify 609 unique datasets across 53 languages, of which 356 remain openly accessible through working public links. These results reveal a substantial visibility gap: many large-speaker languages appear data-poor in catalogue records yet show clear evidence of dataset activity in the research literature. Our findings suggest that multilingual data scarcity should be understood not only as a production problem, but also as a question of documentation, discoverability, and long-term accessibility. Code and data are publicly available at (https://github.com/zhiyintan/dataset-visibility-asymmetry).