Building Arabic NLP from the Ground Up: Twenty Years of Lessons, Failures, and Open Problems

This paper presents the Arabic Women and Society Corpus, a ten year collection of 252,487 public Arabic Facebook posts related to women's empowerment and social wellbeing. The corpus was collected from 51,660 pages across 77 countries between 2013 and 2024, resulting in more than 267 million user interactions. Each post includes engagement metrics such as shares, comments, and emotional reactions, providing a unique view of audience sentiment and social attention. The data were processed using an automated pipeline with language identification, normalization, and metadata cleaning to ensure reliability and reproducibility. The corpus enables large scale analysis of gender discourse, social reform, and emotional engagement across Arabic dialects. It supports research in Arabic natural language processing, computational social science, and digital communication studies. The dataset and accompanying documentation will be released under request for research use.

India's linguistic landscape, spanning 22 scheduled languages and hundreds of marginalized dialects, has driven rapid growth in NLP datasets, benchmarks, and pretrained models. However, no dedicated survey consolidates resources developed specifically for Indian languages. Existing reviews either focus on a few high-resource languages or subsume Indian languages within broader multilingual settings, limiting coverage of low-resource and culturally diverse varieties. To address this gap, we present the first unified survey of Indian NLP resources, covering 200+ datasets, 50+ benchmarks, and 100+ models, tools, and systems across text, speech, multimodal, and culturally grounded tasks. We organize resources by linguistic phenomena, domains, and modalities; analyze trends in annotation, evaluation, and model design; and identify persistent challenges such as data sparsity, uneven language coverage, script diversity, and limited cultural and domain generalization. This survey offers a consolidated foundation for equitable, culturally grounded, and scalable NLP research in the Indian linguistic ecosystem.

Over the past decade, low-resource natural language processing (NLP) has experienced explosive growth, propelled by cross-lingual transfer, massively multilingual models, and the rapid proliferation of benchmarks. Yet this apparent progress masks a critical, insufficiently examined tension: the deep sociolinguistic expertise required to evaluate increasingly complex generative systems is severely strained, inequitably distributed, and structurally marginalised. We present a critical narrative survey of low-resource NLP evaluation (2014-present), tracing its evolution across three phases: early heuristic optimism, the illusions of top-down benchmark scaling, and the current era of generative bottlenecks. We conceptualise the Annotation Scarcity Paradox, the structural friction arising when the technical capacity to scale models vastly outpaces the sovereign human infrastructure required to authentically evaluate them. By examining extractive data pipelines, undercompensated ``ghost work'', and language data flaring, we argue that this paradox threatens the epistemic validity of reported progress. We survey emerging responses -- including data augmentation, model-based evaluation, participatory curation, and annotation-efficient approaches via item response theory and active learning -- and assess their equity and validity trade-offs. We close with a practitioner call to action, arguing that overcoming this bottleneck requires a paradigm shift from transactional data extraction to relational, community-embedded evaluation rooted in epistemic governance, data sovereignty, and shared ownership.