@inproceedings{grimes-washington-2026-artistic,
    title = "Artistic Interventions for {NLP} Annotation Challenges: The Stress Test of Machinic Glossolalia",
    author = "Grimes, Tyler  and
      Washington, Marshall",
    editor = {Hamilton, Sil  and
      {\"O}hman, Emily  and
      Hicke, Rebecca M. M.  and
      Bizzoni, Yuri  and
      Bax, Axel  and
      Matthews, Jacob A.  and
      H{\"a}m{\"a}l{\"a}inen, Mika},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for the Digital Humanities",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.nlp4dh-1.23/",
    pages = "242--254",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-427-9",
    abstract = "MotherBoard{'}s Mother Tongue is a computational linguistics and artistic research project that explores a Large Language Model{'}s (LLM) vocal production of glossolalia. Glossolalia, colloquially known as `speaking in tongues,' consists of the human production of seemingly unintelligible utterances. It is, by its nature, difficult to annotate accurately with linguistic features relevant for natural language. The glossolalia-producing system demonstrated here consists of the interaction of 1) a `nonsense' linguistic corpus 2) a micro-controller based environmental data stream and 3) a fine-tuned LLM. While discussing some philosophical and artistic considerations of machinic glossolalia, we also address some methodological considerations for Natural Language Processing (NLP). Using the artistic project as a case study, we argue that machinic glossolalia presents a `stress test' that could inform both creative redirections of NLP methods and the definitions held by the subfield."
}