As part of the First Workshop on Multilingual Data Quality Signals (WMDQS), the Common Crawl Foundation, MLCommons, EleutherAI, and John Hopkins' Center for Language and Speech Processing are hosting the first shared task on Language Identification (LangID) for web data.

For this shared task participants are expected to submit LangID systems that work well on a wide variety of languages and on web data. We encourage participants to employ a range of approaches, including the development of new architectures and the curation of novel high-quality annotated datasets. To register, please submit a one-page document with a title, a list of authors, a list of provisional languages that you want to focus on, and a brief description of your approach. This document should be sent to wmdqs-pcs@googlegroups.com with the email subject "[Shared Task Abstract Submission]: Submission Title", before 11:59PM on the 23rd of July (Anywhere on Earth).

With this specific shared task our organizations expect to develop a new LangID system that is more robust, has better language coverage, specially for underrepresented languages and that is fast and efficient, so that it can be used to annotate large data collections.

The Common Crawl Foundation in particular expects to use and maintain the results of this shared task in order to improve the language and cultural coverage in our dataset. We also hope that we can maintain a new open source LangID solution in the long-term.