Abstract
Indigenous languages are historically under-served by Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies, but this is changing for some languages with the recent scaling of large multilingual models and an increased focus by the NLP community on endangered languages. This position paper explores ethical considerations in building NLP technologies for Indigenous languages, based on the premise that such projects should primarily serve Indigenous communities. We report on interviews with 17 researchers working in or with Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander communities on language technology projects in Australia. Drawing on insights from the interviews, we recommend practices for NLP researchers to increase attention to the process of engagements with Indigenous communities, rather than focusing only on decontextualised artefacts.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.eacl-short.19
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short 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:
- 204–211
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-short.19
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Ned Cooper, Courtney Heldreth, and Ben Hutchinson. 2024. ”It’s how you do things that matters”: Attending to Process to Better Serve Indigenous Communities with Language Technologies. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 204–211, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- ”It’s how you do things that matters”: Attending to Process to Better Serve Indigenous Communities with Language Technologies (Cooper et al., EACL 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2024.eacl-short.19.pdf