Christina Harrington


Fixing paper assignments

  1. Please select all papers that belong to the same person.
  2. Indicate below which author they should be assigned to.
Provide a valid ORCID iD here. This will be used to match future papers to this author.
Provide the name of the school or the university where the author has received or will receive their highest degree (e.g., Ph.D. institution for researchers, or current affiliation for students). This will be used to form the new author page ID, if needed.

TODO: "submit" and "cancel" buttons here


2024

pdf bib
Understanding the Impacts of Language Technologies’ Performance Disparities on African American Language Speakers
Jay Cunningham | Su Lin Blodgett | Michael Madaio | Hal Daumé Iii | Christina Harrington | Hanna Wallach
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024

This paper examines the experiences of African American Language (AAL) speakers when using language technologies. Previous work has used quantitative methods to uncover performance disparities between AAL speakers and White Mainstream English speakers when using language technologies, but has not sought to understand the impacts of these performance disparities on AAL speakers. Through interviews with 19 AAL speakers, we focus on understanding such impacts in a contextualized and human-centered manner. We find that AAL speakers often undertake invisible labor of adapting their speech patterns to successfully use language technologies, and they make connections between failures of language technologies for AAL speakers and a lack of inclusion of AAL speakers in language technology design processes and datasets. Our findings suggest that NLP researchers and practitioners should invest in developing contextualized and human-centered evaluations of language technologies that seek to understand the impacts of performance disparities on speakers of underrepresented languages and language varieties.