Abstract
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.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.coling-main.313
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Barcelona, Spain (Online)
- Venue:
- COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- International Committee on Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 3504–3519
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.313
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.313
- Cite (ACL):
- Steven Bird. 2020. Decolonising Speech and Language Technology. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 3504–3519, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Decolonising Speech and Language Technology (Bird, COLING 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2020.coling-main.313.pdf