SEACrowd: A Multilingual Multimodal Data Hub and Benchmark Suite for Southeast Asian Languages
Southeast Asia (SEA) is a region rich in linguistic diversity and cultural variety, with over 1,300 indigenous languages and a population of 671 million people. However, prevailing AI models suffer from a significant lack of representation of texts, images, and audio datasets from SEA, compromising the quality of AI models for SEA languages. Evaluating models for SEA languages is challenging due to the scarcity of high-quality datasets, compounded by the dominance of English training data, raising concerns about potential cultural misrepresentation. To address these challenges, we introduce SEACrowd, a collaborative initiative that consolidates a comprehensive resource hub that fills the resource gap by providing standardized corpora in nearly 1,000 SEA languages across three modalities. Through our SEACrowd benchmarks, we assess the quality of AI models on 36 indigenous languages across 13 tasks, offering valuable insights into the current AI landscape in SEA. Furthermore, we propose strategies to facilitate greater AI advancements, maximizing potential utility and resource equity for the future of AI in SEA.
View on arXiv@article{lovenia2025_2406.10118,
title={ SEACrowd: A Multilingual Multimodal Data Hub and Benchmark Suite for Southeast Asian Languages },
author={ Holy Lovenia and Rahmad Mahendra and Salsabil Maulana Akbar and Lester James V. Miranda and Jennifer Santoso and Elyanah Aco and Akhdan Fadhilah and Jonibek Mansurov and Joseph Marvin Imperial and Onno P. Kampman and Joel Ruben Antony Moniz and Muhammad Ravi Shulthan Habibi and Frederikus Hudi and Railey Montalan and Ryan Ignatius and Joanito Agili Lopo and William Nixon and Börje F. Karlsson and James Jaya and Ryandito Diandaru and Yuze Gao and Patrick Amadeus and Bin Wang and Jan Christian Blaise Cruz and Chenxi Whitehouse and Ivan Halim Parmonangan and Maria Khelli and Wenyu Zhang and Lucky Susanto and Reynard Adha Ryanda and Sonny Lazuardi Hermawan and Dan John Velasco and Muhammad Dehan Al Kautsar and Willy Fitra Hendria and Yasmin Moslem and Noah Flynn and Muhammad Farid Adilazuarda and Haochen Li and Johanes Lee and R. Damanhuri and Shuo Sun and Muhammad Reza Qorib and Amirbek Djanibekov and Wei Qi Leong and Quyet V. Do and Niklas Muennighoff and Tanrada Pansuwan and Ilham Firdausi Putra and Yan Xu and Ngee Chia Tai and Ayu Purwarianti and Sebastian Ruder and William Tjhi and Peerat Limkonchotiwat and Alham Fikri Aji and Sedrick Keh and Genta Indra Winata and Ruochen Zhang and Fajri Koto and Zheng-Xin Yong and Samuel Cahyawijaya },
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.10118},
year={ 2025 }
}