What a Creole Wants, What a Creole Needs

Heather Lent, Kelechi Ogueji, Miryam de Lhoneux, Orevaoghene Ahia, Anders Søgaard

Abstract
In recent years, the natural language processing (NLP) community has given increased attention to the disparity of efforts directed towards high-resource languages over low-resource ones. Efforts to remedy this delta often begin with translations of existing English datasets into other languages. However, this approach ignores that different language communities have different needs. We consider a group of low-resource languages, creole languages. Creoles are both largely absent from the NLP literature, and also often ignored by society at large due to stigma, despite these languages having sizable and vibrant communities. We demonstrate, through conversations with creole experts and surveys of creole-speaking communities, how the things needed from language technology can change dramatically from one language to another, even when the languages are considered to be very similar to each other, as with creoles. We discuss the prominent themes arising from these conversations, and ultimately demonstrate that useful language technology cannot be built without involving the relevant community.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.691
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
6439–6449
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.691
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Heather Lent, Kelechi Ogueji, Miryam de Lhoneux, Orevaoghene Ahia, and Anders Søgaard. 2022. What a Creole Wants, What a Creole Needs. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6439–6449, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
What a Creole Wants, What a Creole Needs (Lent et al., LREC 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2022.lrec-1.691.pdf
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