A topic-aligned multilingual corpus of wikipedia articles for studying information asymmetry in low resource languages

Abstract

Wikipedia is the largest web-based open encyclopedia covering more than three hundred languages. However, different language editions of Wikipedia differ significantly in terms of their information coverage. We present a systematic comparison of information coverage in English Wikipedia (most exhaustive) and Wikipedias in eight other widely spoken languages (Arabic, German, Hindi, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish). We analyze the content present in the respective Wikipedias in terms of the coverage of topics as well as the depth of coverage of topics included in these Wikipedias. Our analysis quantifies and provides useful insights about the information gap that exists between different language editions of Wikipedia and offers a roadmap for the Information Retrieval (IR) community to bridge this gap.