Directions for exploiting asymmetries in multilingual Wikipedia

Multilingual Wikipedia has been used extensively for a variety Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Many Wikipedia entries (people, locations, events, etc.) have descriptions in several languages. These descriptions, however, are not identical. On the contrary, descriptions in different languages created for the same Wikipedia entry can vary greatly in terms of description length and information choice. Keeping these peculiarities in mind is necessary while using multilingual Wikipedia as a corpus for training and testing NLP applications. In this paper we present preliminary results on quantifying Wikipedia multilinguality. Our results support the observation about the substantial variation in descriptions of Wikipedia entries created in different languages. However, we believe that asymmetries in multilingual Wikipedia do not make Wikipedia an undesirable corpus for NLP applications training. On the contrary, we outline research directions that can utilize multilingual Wikipedia asymmetries to bridge the communication gaps in multilingual societies.