NusaCrowd: Open Source Initiative for Indonesian NLP Resources

We present NusaCrowd, a collaborative initiative to collect and unite existing resources for Indonesian languages, including opening access to previously non-public resources. Through this initiative, we have has brought together 137 datasets and 117 standardized data loaders. The quality of the datasets has been assessed manually and automatically, and their effectiveness has been demonstrated in multiple experiments. NusaCrowd's data collection enables the creation of the first zero-shot benchmarks for natural language understanding and generation in Indonesian and its local languages. Furthermore, NusaCrowd brings the creation of the first multilingual automatic speech recognition benchmark in Indonesian and its local languages. Our work is intended to help advance natural language processing research in under-represented languages.

Improving Indonesian Text Classification Using Multilingual Language Model

Compared to English, the amount of labeled data for Indonesian text classification tasks is very small. Recently developed multilingual language models have shown its ability to create multilingual representations effectively. This paper investigates the effect of combining English and Indonesian data on building Indonesian text classification (e.g., sentiment analysis and hate speech) using multilingual language models. Using the feature-based approach, we observe its performance on various data sizes and total added English data. The experiment showed that the addition of English data, especially if the amount of Indonesian data is small, improves performance. Using the fine-tuning approach, we further showed its effectiveness in utilizing the English language to build Indonesian text classification models.