Centering the Speech Community

Steven Bird, Dean Yibarbuk

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference Paper published in Proceedingspeer-review

6 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

How can NLP/AI practitioners engage with oral societies and develop locally appropriate language technologies? We report on our experience of working together over five years in a remote community in the far north of Australia, and how we prototyped simple language technologies to support our collaboration. We navigated different understandings of language, the functional differentiation of institutional vs oral languages, and the distinct technology opportunities for each. Our collaboration unsettled the first author's western framing of language as data for exploitation by machines, and we devised a design pattern that seems better aligned with local interests and aspirations. We call for new collaborations on the design of appropriate technologies for oral languages.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEACL 2024 - 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference
EditorsYvette Graham, Matthew Purver, Matthew Purver
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages826-839
Number of pages14
Volume1
ISBN (Electronic)9798891760882
Publication statusPublished - 2024
Event18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, EACL 2024 - St. Julian�s, Malta
Duration: 17 Mar 202422 Mar 2024

Publication series

NameEACL 2024 - 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference
Volume1

Conference

Conference18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, EACL 2024
Country/TerritoryMalta
CitySt. Julian�s
Period17/03/2422/03/24

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 Association for Computational Linguistics.

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