Centering the Speech Community

Steven Bird, Dean Yibarbuk


Abstract
How can NLP/AI practitioners engage with oral societies and develop locally appropriate language technologies? We report on our experience of working together over five years in a remote community in the far north of Australia, and how we prototyped simple language technologies to support our collaboration. We navigated different understandings of language, the functional differentiation of oral vs institutional languages, and the distinct technology opportunities for each. Our collaboration unsettled the first author’s western framing of language as data for exploitation by machines, and we devised a design pattern that seems better aligned with local interests and aspirations. We call for new collaborations on the design of locally appropriate technologies for languages with primary orality.
Anthology ID:
2024.eacl-long.50
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julian’s, Malta
Editors:
Yvette Graham, Matthew Purver
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
826–839
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.50
DOI:
Award:
 Outstanding Paper Award
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Steven Bird and Dean Yibarbuk. 2024. Centering the Speech Community. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 826–839, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Centering the Speech Community (Bird & Yibarbuk, EACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2024.eacl-long.50.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2024.eacl-long.50.mp4