Natural language processing (NLP) has a significant impact on society via technologies such as machine translation and search engines. Despite its success, NLP technology is only widely available for high-resource languages such as English and Chinese, while it remains inaccessible to many languages due to the unavailability of data resources and benchmarks. In this work, we focus on developing resources for languages in Indonesia. Despite being the second most linguistically diverse country, most languages in Indonesia are categorized as endangered and some are even extinct. We develop the first-ever parallel resource for 10 low-resource languages in Indonesia. Our resource includes sentiment and machine translation datasets, and bilingual lexicons. We provide extensive analyses and describe challenges for creating such resources. We hope this work can spark NLP research on Indonesian and other underrepresented languages.

We present NusaCrowd, a collaborative initiative to collect and unify existing resources for Indonesian languages, including opening access to previously non-public resources. Through this initiative, we have brought together 137 datasets and 118 standardized data loaders. The quality of the datasets has been assessed manually and automatically, and their value is demonstrated through multiple experiments.NusaCrowd’s data collection enables the creation of the first zero-shot benchmarks for natural language understanding and generation in Indonesian and the local languages of Indonesia. Furthermore, NusaCrowd brings the creation of the first multilingual automatic speech recognition benchmark in Indonesian and the local languages of Indonesia. Our work strives to advance natural language processing (NLP) research for languages that are under-represented despite being widely spoken.

NLP research is impeded by a lack of resources and awareness of the challenges presented by underrepresented languages and dialects. Focusing on the languages spoken in Indonesia, the second most linguistically diverse and the fourth most populous nation of the world, we provide an overview of the current state of NLP research for Indonesia’s 700+ languages. We highlight challenges in Indonesian NLP and how these affect the performance of current NLP systems. Finally, we provide general recommendations to help develop NLP technology not only for languages of Indonesia but also other underrepresented languages.

This paper discusses the construction and the ongoing development of the Old Javanese Wordnet. The words were extracted from the digitized version of the Old Javanese–English Dictionary (Zoetmulder, 1982). The wordnet is built using the ‘expansion’ approach (Vossen, 1998), leveraging on the Princeton Wordnet’s core synsets and semantic hierarchy, as well as scientific names. The main goal of our project was to produce a high quality, human-curated resource. As of December 2019, the Old Javanese Wordnet contains 2,054 concepts or synsets and 5,911 senses. It is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). We are still developing it and adding more synsets and senses. We believe that the lexical data made available by this wordnet will be useful for a variety of future uses such as the development of Modern Javanese Wordnet and many language processing tasks and linguistic research on Javanese.

This paper describes our attempt to build a sentiment analysis system for Indonesian tweets. With this system, we can study and identify sentiments and opinions in a text or document computationally. We used four thousand manually labeled tweets collected in February and March 2016 to build the model. Because of the variety of content in tweets, we analyze tweets into eight groups in total, including pos(itive), neg(ative), and neu(tral). Finally, we obtained 73.2% accuracy with Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) without normalizer.

This paper describes our attempts to add Indonesian definitions to synsets in the Wordnet Bahasa (Nurril Hirfana Mohamed Noor et al., 2011; Bond et al., 2014), to extract semantic relations between lemmas and definitions for nouns and verbs, such as synonym, hyponym, hypernym and instance hypernym, and to generally improve Wordnet. The original, somewhat noisy, definitions for Indonesian came from the Asian Wordnet project (Riza et al., 2010). The basic method of extracting the relations is based on Bond et al. (2004). Before the relations can be extracted, the definitions were cleaned up and tokenized. We found that the definitions cannot be completely cleaned up because of many misspellings and bad translations. However, we could identify four semantic relations in 57.10% of noun and verb definitions. For the remaining 42.90%, we propose to add 149 new Indonesian lemmas and make some improvements to Wordnet Bahasa and Wordnet in general.