Open but Incompatible: A License Compatibility Analysis of Corpora for Low-Resource African Languages
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
Title:Open but Incompatible: A License Compatibility Analysis of Corpora for Low-Resource African Languages
Abstract:Creative Commons licenses dominate African NLP corpus releases, but their compatibility rules are rarely applied. CC-BY-SA and CC-BY-NC cannot be combined in a single published dataset; a NoDerivs clause silently prohibits tokenisation and annotation. This paper audits the license provenance of over twenty corpus families used in African NLP, constructs a six-tier compatibility matrix, and applies it to three case-study languages: Kituba/Munukutuba, Zarma, and Moore. Four failure modes are documented with primary-source evidence: outright prohibition (JW300, removed from OPUS after a legal audit confirmed Terms of Service violation); composite license misrepresentation (WAXAL, whose CC-BY 4.0 claim is contradicted by its own HuggingFace dataset card); a NoDerivs clause hidden behind a CC-BY label (Tanzil); and data persistence failure (the Congolese Radio Corpus, where 402 of 405 source URLs are now dead). A pre-annotation due diligence checklist and a survey of legally clean enrichment opportunities close the paper.
| Comments: | 12 pages. Published in Proceedings of Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL) 2026 @ LREC-COLING 2026, pages 128-139 |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| ACM classes: | I.2.7 |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2606.28867 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2606.28867v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.28867
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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| Journal reference: | Proceedings of Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL) 2026, pages 128-139. ELRA, 2026 |
Submission history
From: Ernst van Gassen LL.M. [view email][v1] Sat, 27 Jun 2026 11:16:12 UTC (51 KB)
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