Two thousand million?

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

mT5: A Massively Multilingual Pre-trained Text-to-Text Transformer (2020, background): “An important heuristic ﬁltering step in C4 was the removal of lines that did not end in an English terminal punctuation mark.”
Intercultural awareness: modelling an understanding of cultures in intercultural communication through English as a lingua franca (2011, background): “Crystal (2008) estimates there may be as many as two billion ‘non-native’ users of English.”
Artificial error generation for translation-based grammatical error correction (2016, background): “However, depending on where we draw the boundaries, the number of people who speak English at a ‘useful level’ can go up to 1.75 billion (Howson, 2013) or even as high as 2 billion (Crystal, 2008).”