Strengthening Relationships Between Indigenous Communities, Documentary Linguists, and Computational Linguists in the Era of NLP -Assisted Language Revitalization (2023)

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.

## introduction the creation of nlp applications for indigenous languages foot_0 has been an area of increasing interest @xcite @xcite , even as the development of such tools lags behind those for majority languages @xcite . many have recognized @xcite that one of the key challenges is that developing such applications for indigenous languages requires the close collaboration of three disparate groups -computational linguists, documentary linguists, and members of indigenous language communities. in his paper on decolonising language work, bird (2020) describes the steps which he believes are necessary in deepening engagement with language communities, decrying the 'moralistic tropes', the 'nostalgia and sentimentalism', and calling out the 'professional narrowness of the focus on linguistic structures'; all of these contribute to the divide between indigenous language communities and linguists of all stripes. nonetheless, the value of this relationship is widely recognized, as noted by @xcite : "in the development of language technology, providing the speech communities a central role in the design and implementation of language tools may improve the likelihood of the tools' success." this paper will discuss the challenges that these three groups face, certain steps that have already been taken to address the issue, and further recommendations that we have to improve the situation. section 2 will give an overview of what we perceive to be the main challenges to effective collaboration between these three groups. section 3 will highlight some of the responses that the academic community has already taken to address these issues. section 4 discusses the successes and limitations of those responses, and provides suggestions to resolve those issues and overcome future challenges. section 5 provides a conclusion. ## articulating the challenges the overall challenges to collaboration among the three groups can perhaps best be understood by examining the challenges present in the relationships between each pair of groups. ## academic responses being aware of both these complexities as well as the urgency to overcome them, the academic community has taken a variety of concrete steps to begin addressing this challenge over the last several years. several important initiatives can be highlighted here. computel began in 2014 as a two-day workshop that was part of the 52nd annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics. it was billed as "the use of computational methods in the study of endangered languages". computel-2 took place in 2017, this time as a two-day event colocated with the international conference on language documentation and conservation (icldc) ( http://ling.lll.hawaii.edu/sites/icldc/ ) at the university of hawaii, one of the largest and most presti-gious conferences in its field. the computel workshops focus on "the use of computational methods in the study, support, and revitalization of endangered languages. the primary aim of the workshop is to continue narrowing the gap between computational linguists interested in working on methods for endangered languages, field linguists working on documenting these languages, and the language communities who are striving to maintain their languages." ( https://altlab.ualberta.ca/computel-2/ ) subsequent gatherings have continued over the past six years, developing into a largely annual event co-located with either icldc or an acl conference: 2019 computel-3 @ icldc; 2021 computel-4 online (w/ icldc); 2022 computel-5 in dublin @ acl; 2023 comput-el-6 online (w/ icldc). the development of the one-time workshop into an annual conference speaks to the recognition of the importance and timeliness of the work in this area. building on the development of computel, the acl special interest group in endangered languages (sigel) was founded in 2019. the purpose of that group is to "foster computationally grounded research in all useful aspects in documenting, processing, revitalizing and supporting endangered languages, as well as minority, indigenous and low-resource languages." sigel has just over 150 members currently (march 2023) and has taken over the responsibility for organizing the computel conferences. sigel has begun to organize an online speaker series focused on sharing best practices in this area. the first event was held in october 2021 with the theme of automatic speech recognition in native american languages. relatedly, a separate elra/isca sig, the special interest group in under-resourced languages (sigul) was founded in 2017, and had its first meeting co-located with interspeech that same year. sigul positions its gatherings as "a forum for the presentation and discussion of cutting-edge research in text and speech processing for underresourced languages by academic and industry researchers." ( https://sigul-2022.ilc.cnr.it/ ) "under-resourced" is a very broad category when it comes to text and speech processing, but it certainly includes all indigenous and/or endangered languages, in addition to others. sigul further mentions: "it is also very important that these occasions leave space for communities and representatives of under-resourced and endangered languages, in order to ensure that the research and development of technological solutions are in line with the needs and demands of those communities, with a view to open and inclusive research with strong social impact." the creation of these groups -as well as others such as americas nlp ( https://turing.iimas.unam.mx/americasnlp/ ) the continuation of these conferences, and the publications that result from them, show clearly that much important work is being done in this area. however, these gatherings have so far struggled to attract a balanced mix of their target demographics -computational linguists, documentary linguists, and, most importantly, community members working to revitalize their languages. while all of the organizers recognize the importance of "leaving space" for community voices in such gatherings, their very nature as academic gatherings (typically co-located with other, larger academic gatherings), with abstract deadlines, scientific committees and published proceedings, make it challenging to meaningfully include such voices. this is perhaps unsurprising, as we are still in the early days of organizing gatherings of this type. much can likely be learned from the history of icldc and other gatherings such as colang ( https://www.colanginstitute.org/ ), both of which have evolved over the past decade to be more inclusive of community voices in their presentations and courses, and have placed community needs closer to the centre of their remit. while each of these organizations seeks to foster collaboration quite broadly across the three groups, there has been some notable success at the level of individual projects, such as those described in @xcite . it is noteworthy that this effort, specifically, was quite amply funded, had the backing of the national research council of canada, and was able to enlist experts from all three groups. this shows that given enough time, funding, and expertise, significant progress can be made in developing language technology for indigenous languages, and as such it makes a strong "business case" for increased support to projects of this type. clearly, though, this model of mass collaboration is not so easily extended to other contexts, especially in countries lacking a robust and well-funded research infrastructure. as such, the challenge of developing more flexible and sustainable models of collaboration in this area remains. ## recommendations building on the good work that has already been done to bridge the divide that exists between the three groups, we can provide several specific recommendations to further strengthen these relationships. ## conclusion in this paper, we have looked at the relationship between three groups: computational linguists, documentary linguists, and indigenous communities. these groups have distinct yet overlapping interests when it comes to the development and deployment of language technology. the challenge over the years has been to find ways for these three groups to work together better. as in all relationships, communication and respect are the keys to understanding and trust. this can be clearly seen in the improvements in the working relationships between indigenous communities and documentary linguists over the past several decades. by making the effort to better understand each other's needs and perspectives, the two groups have been able to make progress toward more respectful and equitable relationships, thus better enabling the documentary work that provides the basis for any computational applications. a greater challenge has remained in building similarly productive relationships with computational linguists. initiatives created by organizations such as cilldi, colang, computel, sigel, sigul, and others, have begun to bridge the gap in understanding between documentary linguists and indigenous communities on the one hand, and computational linguists on the other. however it is clear that there is still a long way to go in strengthening these relationships. expanding opportunities for documentary linguists and indigenous community members to learn more about computational linguistics, the diversity of nlp applications, and the potential value of such technology in supporting language revitalization is an urgent concern if much progress is going to be made in the coming years, before even more languages fall silent. as we make our way through the international decade of indigenous languages ( https://www.unesco.org/en/decades/indigenouslanguages ), it is imperative that more individuals and organizations step up to create these types of opportunities for awareness-building and skills-training. in the long run, it is clear that training indigenous people to be linguists, programmers and developers who can create applications for their own languages is the ideal solution. indeed, recent years have seen more indigenous people pursuing these career paths, to the great benefit of each of these fields (e.g. https://natives4linguistics.wordpress.com/ ). for too many indigenous students, though, these options remain out of reach, and the immediate needs of their communities and their languages often put these pursuits on the backburner. language revitalization will always be a multigenerational societal project, but the process can be accelerated by the thoughtful development and deployment of nlp applications. as such, we are collectively obliged to do the critical work to strengthen the relationships between these three groups, for the benefit of current and future generations.