@inproceedings{gessler-etal-2025-understanding,
    title = "Understanding the Gap: an Analysis of Research Collaborations in {NLP} and Language Documentation",
    author = "Gessler, Luke  and
      Palmer, Alexis  and
      Wense, Katharina Von Der",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.48/",
    pages = "867--877",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5",
    abstract = "Despite over 20 years of NLP work explicitly intended for application in language documentation (LD), practical use of this work remains vanishingly scarce. This issue has been noted and discussed over the past 10 years, but without the benefit of data to inform the discourse.To address this lack in the literature, we present a survey- and interview-based analysis of the lack of adoption of NLP in LD, focusing on the matter of collaborations between documentary linguists and NLP researchers. Our data show support for ideas from previous work but also reveal the importance of little-discussed factors such as misaligned professional incentives, technical knowledge burdens, and LD software."
}