Open but Incompatible: A License Compatibility Analysis of Corpora for Low-Resource African Languages

arXiv:2606.28867v1 Announce Type: new 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...