Why You Should Do NLP Beyond English
Natural language processing (NLP) research predominantly focuses on developing methods that work well for English despite the many positive benefits of working on other languages. These benefits range from an outsized societal impact to modelling a wealth of linguistic features to avoiding overfitting as well as interesting challenges for machine learning (ML).
There are around 7,000 languages spoken around the world. The map above (see the interactive version at Langscape) gives an overview of languages spoken around the world, with each green circle representing a native language. Most of the world’s languages are spoken in Asia, Africa, the Pacific region and