Local Languages, Third Spaces, and other High-Resource Scenarios
Steven Bird · Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2022
How can language technology address the diverse situations of the world's languages?In one view, languages exist on a resource continuum and the challenge is to scale existing solutions, bringing under-resourced languages into the high-resource world.In another view, presented here, the world's language ecology includes standardised languages, local languages, and contact languages.These are often subsumed under the label of 'under-resourced languages' even though they have distinct functions and prospects.I explore this position and propose some ecologically-aware language technology agendas.