The Annotation Bottleneck in Persian Text NLP: Persian as an Annotation-Scarce Language

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.

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.

We target practical anonymization of Persian customer chats by training a compact NER model from LLM-labeled supervision and selecting the best labeler for deployment. We compare three instruction-tuned LLMs: DeepSeek-V3-0324, GPT-OSS-120B, and Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507, to produce span annotations under a shared JSON protocol, yielding four corpora (OSS_ZeroShot, Qwen_ZeroShot, Qwen_FewShot, DeepSeek_FewShot). A MatinaRoberta-based token-classifier is trained per corpus and evaluated with token-level Precision/Recall/F1 (overall and per-class). We also report Label Coverage Recall (LCR), the proportion of gold non-O tokens predicted as non-O, and quantify cross-labeler behavior via a token-level Venn on test annotations. Finally, we contrast test-set annotation latency of the LLMs on H200 nodes with the trained NER's test-time labeling on a single RTX 3090. Results show that supervision from OSS_ZeroShot yields the strongest macro-F1 and LCR, while the resulting NER labels an entire 40K-message test set in approximately 2 minutes on one consumer GPU. This establishes a practical path to high-quality, low-cost anonymization for Persian industrial data.