Must NLP be Extractive?
Steven Bird · 2024
How do we roll out language technologies across a world with 7,000 languages?In one story, we scale the successes of NLP further into 'low-resource' languages, doing ever more with less.However, this approach does not recognise the fact that -beyond the 500 institutional languages -the remaining languages are oral vernaculars.These speech communities interact with the outside world using a 'contact language'.I argue that contact languages are the appropriate target for technologies like speech recognition and machine translation, and that the 6,500 oral vernaculars should be approached differently.I share stories from an Indigenous community where local people reshaped an extractive agenda to align with their relational agenda.I describe the emerging paradigm of Relational NLP and explain how it opens the way to non-extractive methods and to solutions that enhance human agency.