CommonLID: Re-evaluating State-of-the-Art Language Identification Performance on Web Data
Paper · 2026 · Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Laurie Burchell, Catherine Arnett et al.
Summary
Language identification (LID) is often treated as a solved task. In practice, it remains unreliable for many languages on noisy, mixed web text, which is the main source of multilingual pre-training corpora. Most existing benchmarks, such as FLORES, UDHR and Bible data, are clean, translated or religious, so they give an overly optimistic picture. The authors built CommonLID, an openly licensed web-domain benchmark. Native speakers, mostly recruited from the NLP community through hackathons, labelled text line by line. The source material was sampled from Common Crawl and MADLAD-400. With this benchmark and five other evaluation sets, they compared eight widely used LID models and also tested several OpenAI GPT models. No system works well across every domain. GlotLID and CLD2 offer the best overall trade-off between coverage and speed, but common evaluations overstate accuracy on web data, especially for low-resource languages. The resource helps practitioners choose and build LID tools suited to curating web corpora for under-served languages.
Key points
- CommonLID covers 109 language varieties, 78 of which have at least 100 annotated lines. It was produced with more than eighty annotators and is released on Hugging Face (commoncrawl/CommonLID) together with its code.
- Candidate documents came from the WET files of CC-MAIN-2024-22 and CC-MAIN-2025-05, selected via the Ungoliant/OSCAR pipeline. Selection used fastText, OpenLID and GlotLID, with additional documents from MADLAD-400. The authors note that relying on existing LID models for selection biases which data gets included.
- No model exceeds 75% F1 on all evaluation datasets. GlotLID scores highest on FLORES and Bibles, partly because Bible text is often its only training data for long-tail languages.
- On a shared core set of 76 languages, GlotLID reaches 93.5 F1 against 91.8 for GPT-5. On the 294-language Afro* subset the gap widens to 90.6 versus 66.6, despite the much higher cost of running GPT models.
Institutions
Fields, topics and concepts
📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works
Cite
Cite as Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Laurie Burchell, Catherine Arnett, Rafael Mosquera, Sara Hincapié Monsalve, Thom Vaughan, Damian Stewart, Malte Ostendorff, Idris Abdulmumin, Vukosi Marivate, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Hend Al-Khalifa, Nadia Ghezaiel Hammouda, Verrah Akinyi Otiende, Tack Hwa Wong, Jakhongir Saydaliev, Melika Nobakhtian, Muhammad Ravi Shulthan Habibi, Chalamalasetti Kranti, Carol Muchemi, Khang Nguyen, Faisal Muhammad Adam, Luis Frentzen Salim, Reem Alqifari, Cynthia Jayne Amol, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Ilker Kesen, Ahmad Mustafid, Pavel Stepachev, Leshem Choshen, David Anugraha, Hamada Nayel, Seid Muhie Yimam, Vallerie Alexandra Putra, My Chiffon Nguyen, Azmine Toushik Wasi, Gouthami Vadithya, Rob van der Goot, Lanwenn ar C'horr, Karan Dua, Andrew Yates, Mithil Bangera, Yeshil Bangera, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Shu Okabe, Fenal Ashokbhai Ilasariya, Dmitry Gaynullin, Genta Indra Winata, Yiyuan Li, Juan Pablo Martínez, Amit Agarwal, Ikhlasul Akmal Hanif, Raia Abu Ahmad, Esther Adenuga, Filbert Aurelian Tjiaranata, Weerayut Buaphet, Michael Anugraha, Sowmya Vajjala, Benjamin L Rice, Azril Hafizi Amirudin, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, Srikant Panda, Yassine Toughrai, Bruhan Kyomuhendo, Daniel Ruffinelli, Akshata, Manuel Goulão, Ej Zhou, Ingrid Gabriela Franco Ramirez, Cristina Aggazzotti, Konstantin Dobler, Jun Kevin, Quentin Pagès, Nicholas Andrews, Nuhu Ibrahim, Mattes Ruckdeschel, Amr Keleg, Mike Zhang, Casper Rufaro Muziri, Saron Samuel, Sotaro Takeshita, Kun Kerdthaisong, Luca Foppiano, Rasul Dent, Tommaso Green, Ahmad Mustapha Wali, Kamohelo Makaaka, Vicky Feliren, Inshirah Idris, Hande Celikkanat, Abdulhamid Abubakar, Jean Maillard, Benoît Sagot, Thibault Clérice, Kenton Murray and Sarah K. K. Luger. 2026. CommonLID: Re-evaluating State-of-the-Art Language Identification Performance on Web Data. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers).
@inproceedings{suarez2026commonlid,
title = {{CommonLID: Re-evaluating State-of-the-Art Language Identification Performance on Web Data}},
author = {Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Laurie Burchell, Catherine Arnett, Rafael Mosquera, Sara Hincapié Monsalve, Thom Vaughan, Damian Stewart, Malte Ostendorff, Idris Abdulmumin, Vukosi Marivate, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Hend Al-Khalifa, Nadia Ghezaiel Hammouda, Verrah Akinyi Otiende, Tack Hwa Wong, Jakhongir Saydaliev, Melika Nobakhtian, Muhammad Ravi Shulthan Habibi, Chalamalasetti Kranti, Carol Muchemi, Khang Nguyen, Faisal Muhammad Adam, Luis Frentzen Salim, Reem Alqifari, Cynthia Jayne Amol, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Ilker Kesen, Ahmad Mustafid, Pavel Stepachev, Leshem Choshen, David Anugraha, Hamada Nayel, Seid Muhie Yimam, Vallerie Alexandra Putra, My Chiffon Nguyen, Azmine Toushik Wasi, Gouthami Vadithya, Rob {van der Goot}, Lanwenn ar C'horr, Karan Dua, Andrew Yates, Mithil Bangera, Yeshil Bangera, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Shu Okabe, Fenal Ashokbhai Ilasariya, Dmitry Gaynullin, Genta Indra Winata, Yiyuan Li, Juan Pablo Martínez, Amit Agarwal, Ikhlasul Akmal Hanif, Raia Abu Ahmad, Esther Adenuga, Filbert Aurelian Tjiaranata, Weerayut Buaphet, Michael Anugraha, Sowmya Vajjala, Benjamin L Rice, Azril Hafizi Amirudin, Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi, Srikant Panda, Yassine Toughrai, Bruhan Kyomuhendo, Daniel Ruffinelli, Akshata, Manuel Goulão, Ej Zhou, Ingrid Gabriela Franco Ramirez, Cristina Aggazzotti, Konstantin Dobler, Jun Kevin, Quentin Pagès, Nicholas Andrews, Nuhu Ibrahim, Mattes Ruckdeschel, Amr Keleg, Mike Zhang, Casper Rufaro Muziri, Saron Samuel, Sotaro Takeshita, Kun Kerdthaisong, Luca Foppiano, Rasul Dent, Tommaso Green, Ahmad Mustapha Wali, Kamohelo Makaaka, Vicky Feliren, Inshirah Idris, Hande Celikkanat, Abdulhamid Abubakar, Jean Maillard, Benoît Sagot, Thibault Clérice, Kenton Murray and Sarah K. K. Luger},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
year = {2026},
doi = {10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.1527},
url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.1527}
}References
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