{"slug": "open-but-incompatible-a-license-compatibility-analysis-of-corpora-for-low", "title": "Open but Incompatible: A License Compatibility Analysis of Corpora for Low-Resource African Languages", "summary": "A new audit of over twenty African NLP corpus families reveals widespread license incompatibilities, including CC-BY-SA and CC-BY-NC datasets that cannot be legally combined and NoDerivs clauses that prohibit tokenisation. The study documents four failure modes with primary-source evidence, such as the JW300 corpus removed from OPUS for Terms of Service violations and the WAXAL corpus misrepresenting its license. The paper provides a due diligence checklist and legally clean enrichment opportunities for low-resource African languages.", "body_md": "arXiv:2606.28867v1 Announce Type: new\nAbstract: 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.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/open-but-incompatible-a-license-compatibility-analysis-of-corpora-for-low", "canonical_source": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28867", "published_at": "2026-06-30 04:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-30 04:27:59.385612+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["natural-language-processing", "ai-ethics", "ai-policy"], "entities": ["Creative Commons", "OPUS", "JW300", "WAXAL", "Tanzil", "HuggingFace", "Kituba", "Zarma"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/open-but-incompatible-a-license-compatibility-analysis-of-corpora-for-low", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/open-but-incompatible-a-license-compatibility-analysis-of-corpora-for-low.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/open-but-incompatible-a-license-compatibility-analysis-of-corpora-for-low.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/open-but-incompatible-a-license-compatibility-analysis-of-corpora-for-low.jsonld"}}