Work

”It’s how you do things that matters”: Attending to Process to Better Serve Indigenous Communities with Language Technologies

Year: 2024

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Indigenous languages are historically underserved by Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies, but this is changing for some languages with the recent scaling of large multilingual models and an increased focus by the NLP community on endangered languages.This position paper explores ethical considerations in building NLP technologies for Indigenous languages, based on the premise that such projects should primarily serve Indigenous communities.We report on interviews with 17 researchers working in or with Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander communities on language technology projects in Australia.Drawing on insights from the interviews, we recommend practices for NLP researchers to increase attention to the process of engagements with Indigenous communities, rather than focusing only on decontextualised artefacts.

Source: Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

DOI: 10.18653/v1/2024.eacl-short.19

Authors: Ned Cooper, Courtney Heldreth, Ben Hutchinson

Institutions: Australian National University, Google (United States), Google (Australia)

Language: English

Topic: Natural Language Processing Techniques

Subfield: Artificial Intelligence

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Reduced inequalities

Open Access status: hybrid

OpenAlex ID: W4411638754