Language-annotated Tweets

This is a collection of professionally language-annotated Tweets, intended for measuring performance of automated language identifiers. Data files:

• uniformly_sampled.tsv - a uniform sample of all Twitter data; approximately 120k rows. Useful for measuring precision or recall of large languages, and for estimating the language distribution.
• recall_oriented.tsv - about 1500 Tweets per true language. Useful for for measuring recall regardless of language size.
• precision_oriented.tsv - about 1000 Tweets per language as determined by an old version of Twitter’s internal language identifier. A biased but still somewhat dataset for estimating the precision for small languages.

All files contain one Tweet per line, formatted as <true language code><TAB><tweet ID>. In addition, precision_oriented.tsv contains language codes like not_en, which indicates this tweet is not English, though we don't know its actual language.

For details on how the Tweets were collected, see our blog post on the Twitter Engineering Blog or its local copy.

All Tweets are from July 2014 and cover 70 languages: am (Amharic), ar (Arabic), bg(Bulgarian), bn(Bengali), bo(Tibetan), bs(Bosnian), ca(Catalan), ckb (Sorani Kurdish), cs(Czech), cy(Welsh), da(Danish), de(German), dv(Maldivian), el(Greek), en(English), es(Spanish), et(Estonian), eu(Basque), fa(Persian), fi(Finnish), fr(French), gu(Gujarati), he(Hebrew), hi(Hindi), hi-Latn (Latinized Hindi), hr(Croatian), ht(Haitian Creole), hu(Hungarian), hy(Armenian), id(Indonesian), is(Icelandic), it(Italian), ja(Japanese), ka(Georgian), km(Khmer), kn(Kannada), ko(Korean), lo(Lao), lt(Lithuanian), lv(Latvian), ml(Malayalam), mr(Marathi), ms(Malay), my(Burmese), ne(Nepali), nl(Dutch), no(Norwegian), pa(Panjabi), pl(Polish), ps(Pashto), pt(Portuguese), ro(Romanian), ru(Russian), sd(Sindhi), si(Sinhala), sk(Slovak), sl(Slovenian), sr(Serbian), sv(Swedish), ta(Tamil), te(Telugu), th(Thai), tl(Tagalog), tr(Turkish), ug(Uyghur), uk(Ukrainian), ur(Urdu), vi(Vietnamese), zh-CN (Simplified Chinese), zh-TW (Traditional Chinese). There is a smattering of other language codes present in the data as an artifact of our labeling process, but Tweets in those languages were not collected systematically.

Downloading

Because of privacy concerns, we aren't able to provide a snapshot of Tweets' text. To retrieve the text, use the Twitter API. An example of efficiently fetching the Tweets 100 at a time using the statuses/lookup API endpoint, the twurl command-line utility, and jq for JSON parsing:

cat >/tmp/fetch.sh <<'EOF'
#!/bin/bash
sleep 5
twurl "/1.1/statuses/lookup.json?id=$(echo $@ | tr ' ' ,)&trim_user=true" | jq -c ".[]|[.id_str, .text]"
EOF

cat uniformly_sampled.tsv | cut -f2 | xargs -n100 /tmp/fetch.sh > hydrated.json

Make sure you’ve completed the OAuth setup for twurl (see “Getting started” on their github page) before running the above commands. The code above observes the API rate limits by sleeping between requests. It silently skips Tweets that have been removed, and you will need to join the hydrated.json file with original language labels in uniformly_sampled.tsv.