Centering the Speech Community
Steven Bird, Dean Yibarbuk · 2024
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 institutional vs oral 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 appropriate technologies for oral languages.