TY - GEN
T1 - Decolonising Speech and Language Technology
AU - Bird, Steven
N1 - Funding Information:
I am indebted to the Bininj people of Northern Australia for the opportunity to live and work in their community, and particularly to Lois Nadjamerrek, Stuart Guymala, and Dean Yibarbuk for their friendship and guidance over many years. This paper has benefitted from feedback from Mat Bettinson, William Lane, Jennyfer Lawrence Taylor, Brandon Wiltshire, and several anonymous reviewers. This research has been supported by grants from the Australian Research Council entitled Learning English and Aboriginal Languages for Work, and the Indigenous Languages and Arts Program entitled Mobile Software for Oral Language Learning in Arnhem Land, and covered by a research permit from the Northern Land Council and approvals from the board of Warddeken Land Management and the CDU Human Research Ethics Committee.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 COLING 2020 - 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference. All rights reserved.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - After generations of exploitation, Indigenous people often respond negatively to the idea that their languages are data ready for the taking. By treating Indigenous knowledge as a commodity, speech and language technologists risk disenfranchising local knowledge authorities, reenacting the causes of language endangerment. Scholars in related fields have responded to calls for decolonisation, and we in the speech and language technology community need to follow suit, and explore what this means for our practices that involve Indigenous languages and the communities who own them. This paper reviews colonising discourses in speech and language technology, and suggests new ways of working with Indigenous communities, and seeks to open a discussion of a postcolonial approach to computational methods for supporting language vitality.
AB - After generations of exploitation, Indigenous people often respond negatively to the idea that their languages are data ready for the taking. By treating Indigenous knowledge as a commodity, speech and language technologists risk disenfranchising local knowledge authorities, reenacting the causes of language endangerment. Scholars in related fields have responded to calls for decolonisation, and we in the speech and language technology community need to follow suit, and explore what this means for our practices that involve Indigenous languages and the communities who own them. This paper reviews colonising discourses in speech and language technology, and suggests new ways of working with Indigenous communities, and seeks to open a discussion of a postcolonial approach to computational methods for supporting language vitality.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85101881458&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.313
DO - 10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.313
M3 - Conference Paper published in Proceedings
AN - SCOPUS:85101881458
T3 - COLING 2020 - 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference
SP - 3504
EP - 3519
BT - COLING 2020 - 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference
A2 - Scott, Donia
A2 - Bel, Nuria
A2 - Zong, Chengqing
PB - Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
CY - Czech Republic
T2 - 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, COLING 2020
Y2 - 8 December 2020 through 13 December 2020
ER -