Abstract
As the global crisis of language endangerment deepens, Indigenous communities have continued to seek new means of preserving, promoting and passing on their languages to future generations. For many communities, modern language technology holds the promise of accelerating that process. However, the cultural and disciplinary divides between documentary linguists, computational linguists and Indigenous communities have posed an on-going challenge for the development and deployment of NLP applications that can support the documentation and revitalization of Indigenous languages. In this paper, we discuss the main barriers to collaboration that these groups have encountered, as well as some notable initiatives in recent years to bring the groups closer together. We follow this with specific recommendations to build upon those efforts, calling for increased opportunities for awareness-building and skills-training in computational linguistics, tailored to the specific needs of both documentary linguists and Indigenous community members. We see this as an essential step as we move forward into an era of NLP-assisted language revitalization.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.c3nlp-1.4
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the First Workshop on Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP (C3NLP)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Dubrovnik, Croatia
- Editors:
- Sunipa Dev, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, David Adelani, Dirk Hovy, Luciana Benotti
- Venue:
- C3NLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 25–34
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.c3nlp-1.4
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.c3nlp-1.4
- Cite (ACL):
- Darren Flavelle and Jordan Lachler. 2023. Strengthening Relationships Between Indigenous Communities, Documentary Linguists, and Computational Linguists in the Era of NLP-Assisted Language Revitalization. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP (C3NLP), pages 25–34, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Strengthening Relationships Between Indigenous Communities, Documentary Linguists, and Computational Linguists in the Era of NLP-Assisted Language Revitalization (Flavelle & Lachler, C3NLP 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2023.c3nlp-1.4.pdf