Abstract
How do we roll out language technologies across a world with 7,000 languages? In one story, we scale the successes of NLP further into ‘low-resource’ languages, doing ever more with less. However, this approach does not recognise the fact that, beyond the 500 institutional languages, the remaining languages are oral vernaculars spoken by communities who use a language of wider communication to interact with the outside world. I argue that such ‘contact languages’ are the appropriate target for technologies like machine translation, and that the 6,500 oral languages must be approached differently. I share a story from an Indigenous community, where local people reshaped an extractive agenda to align with their relational agenda. I describe the emerging paradigm of relational NLP and explain how it opens the way to non-extractive methods and to solutions that enhance human agency.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.acl-long.797
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Bangkok, Thailand
- Editors:
- Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 14915–14929
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.797
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.797
- Cite (ACL):
- Steven Bird. 2024. Must NLP be Extractive?. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 14915–14929, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Must NLP be Extractive? (Bird, ACL 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2024.acl-long.797.pdf