  Real world data differs radically from the benchmark corpora we use in
natural language processing (NLP). As soon as we apply our technologies to the
real world, performance drops. The reason for this problem is obvious: NLP
models are trained on samples from a limited set of canonical varieties that
are considered standard, most prominently English newswire. However, there are
many dimensions, e.g., socio-demographics, language, genre, sentence type, etc.
on which texts can differ from the standard. The solution is not obvious: we
cannot control for all factors, and it is not clear how to best go beyond the
current practice of training on homogeneous data from a single domain and
language.
  In this paper, I review the notion of canonicity, and how it shapes our
community's approach to language. I argue for leveraging what I call fortuitous
data, i.e., non-obvious data that is hitherto neglected, hidden in plain sight,
or raw data that needs to be refined. If we embrace the variety of this
heterogeneous data by combining it with proper algorithms, we will not only
produce more robust models, but will also enable adaptive language technology
capable of addressing natural language variation.
