Mining Wikidata for Name Resources for African Languages
This work supports further development of language technology for the languages of Africa
by providing a Wikidata-derived resource of
name lists corresponding to common entity
types (person, location, and organization).
While we are not the first to mine Wikidata for
name lists, our approach emphasizes scalability and replicability and addresses data quality issues for languages that do not use Latin
scripts. We produce lists containing approximately 1.9 million names across 28 African
languages. We describe the data, the process
used to produce it, and its limitations, and provide the software and data for public use. Finally, we discuss the ethical considerations of
producing this resource and others of its kind.
Link