Decolonising Speech and Language Technology (2020)

Abstract: After generations of exploitation, Indigenous people often respond negatively to the idea that their languages are data ready for the taking. By treating Indigenous knowledge as a commodity, speech and language technologists risk disenfranchising local knowledge authorities, reenacting the causes of language endangerment. Scholars in related fields have responded to calls for decolonisation, and we in the speech and language technology community need to follow suit, and explore what this means for our practices that involve Indigenous languages and the communities who own them. This paper reviews colonising discourses in speech and language technology, and suggests new ways of working with Indigenous communities, and seeks to open a discussion of a postcolonial approach to computational methods for supporting language vitality.

## introduction so much of the templates, the guidelines, the university courses, have been created along the lines of a colonising language. our task is to figure out how to be able to speak our languages, how to teach our languages, how to maintain our languages, how to normalise our languages, from our ways, from our perspective, from our point of view. -lil'watul lorna williams, lil'wat first nation this is how lorna williams addressed 300 people at language technologies for all @xcite . we had been summoned to the unesco headquarters in paris with these words: everyone should have the possibility to get access to language technologies in his/her native languages, including indigenous languages. the challenge is twofold: (i) preserving culture through language while (ii) allowing communication across languages. languages that miss the opportunity to adopt language technologies will be less and less used, while languages that benefit from cross-lingual technologies such as machine translation will be more and more used @xcite . the world's 370 million indigenous people (united nations, 2010) have been passing down their knowledge over countless generations, commanding multiple languages in the process. but now, indigenous people are apparently unable to go on without speech and language technologies. by the time she addressed the conference, williams had witnessed two days of "tech-evangelism" @xcite . yet she did not call on her community to get with the program. she said: the task is to figure out ... how to maintain our languages from our ways, our perspective, our point of view. two years earlier, in australia, the federal minister for communication and the arts announced new funding for indigenous languages. he brought together the nation's linguists and language workers with the goal of "facilitating ideas and skills to advance digital solutions to protect, preserve and celebrate indigenous languages" (bit.ly/34lffkk). in a session titled "digital approaches that work" a 23-yearold anaiwan man, callum clayton-dixon, spoke out: "we need to prioritise 'on land' over 'online'... you don't revive a language with an app but with people reconnecting with people and country." from the applause and the endorsements, his was a widely held view. figure 1 : the language documentation mechanism: linguists (present and past) create language resources that support the construction of pedagogical resources to be used in language revitalisation for 25 years, many linguists have presented "indigenous language endangerment as a crisis that requires intervention" @xcite . like many, i have taken this crisis as an golden opportunity for technology, prioritising data capture over local self-determination, in such areas as digital preservation @xcite , capacity building @xcite @xcite , and app development @xcite . five years ago i entered the indigenous country of arnhem land in northern australia imagining language capture on an even larger scale. in the course of living and working in an aboriginal community, i began to participate in the language activities of a school, a ranger program, and an arts centre. i came to see how commodifying indigenous languages as data alienates speakers @xcite , and how technology does not address the social injustices that underly language endangerment @xcite . i saw how a preoccupation with data and technology might reenact the causes of language endangerment. this is a paper about colonising practices in speech and language technology, ways to identify them, and to shift to decolonising practices. i begin with illustrations and analysis of the ways that technology may be thought to save languages (sec. 2), before reviewing some approaches to decolonising language work (sec. 3). finally, i present a new framing for speech and technology work in terms of participatory design, and a variety of concrete actions for consideration (sec. 4). i acknowledge my positionality as a western researcher of settler-coloniser heritage. i am committed to an ongoing process of decolonising my solidarity with the community. while i have consulted my indigenous advisors on many of the topics discussed here, i do not speak for them. i acknowledge the discomfort (and irony) of the othering that is inherent in my use of terms like "they" and "them," and the fact that i did not manage to find a way of coauthoring such a paper with an indigenous colleague. ## technology saving languages since the declaration of the "world's languages in crisis" @xcite , many linguists have taken on the task of documenting endangered languages @xcite , with particular focus on socalled "indigenous languages" @xcite . documentation is believed to play into revitalisation @xcite . the mechanism has not been made explicit, but perhaps figure 1 comes close. language programs are often cast as an antidote to endangerment, when both are "facets of the same process of political integration" @xcite . we see this in figure 1 in the absence of agency of speakers, and in the construct of "pedagogical resources" to be deployed in formal programs. there is scant evidence after 25 years that documentation has played a significant role in saving languages @xcite . indeed, unesco identifies many factors that impact the survival prospects for a language, such as intergenerational transmission (unesco ad hoc expert group on endangered languages, 2003). nevertheless, speech and language technologists have bought into the documentary agenda, e.g., "systems constructed with zero expert resources [can] help field linguists document endangered languages, by providing tools to semi-automatically analyze and annotate audio recordings using automatically discovered linguistic units" @xcite . this cooperation is hardly surprising when the documentary agenda aligns so neatly with the data-centric approach in speech and language technology. we can harness linguists and speakers to create training data, and arrive at a technological version of the mechanism (fig. 2 ). there are at least three problems with this approach. 2.1 "zero resource scenario" "colonization is . a speech scientist contacted a linguist for his data: "the scenario was that nothing was known about the language, and the data set available consisted solely of audio recordings of sentences plus translations into other languages" @xcite . the scientist did not need the linguist's transcriptions, dictionary, phoneme inventory, or knowledge. nor did he need to engage with speakers of the language. a fully-automatic, universal solution based on sanitised data was preferrable to the alternative of working with people who have knowledge about the language and concerns for its future. this "zero resource scenario" disenfranchises local knowledge authorities @xcite . it is a version of the cliché of "new technologies saving ancient languages," perpetuating colonial dichotomies of advanced vs. primitive, of domesticated vs. wild @xcite . when we are unable to hear what linguists and speakers would tell us, we must fall back on unsupervised methods, like discovering a phone inventory from speech alone @xcite @xcite , or segmenting phone sequences into "words" @xcite . yet after centuries of colonisation, missionary endeavours, and linguistic fieldwork, all languages have been identified and classified. there is always a wordlist. we know the language family. related languages have been studied. there are texts and translations. there may be linguists and speakers. in short, we do not need to "discover" the language ex nihilo (l1 acquisition) but to leverage the available resources (l2 acquisition). indigenous languages do not deserve this zero resource framing. ## decolonising language work linguists have been deepening their engagement with speech communities @xcite @xcite , calling out the emotive and moralistic tropes used to legitimise the documentary approach @xcite , criticising nostalgia and sentimentalism @xcite , observing the professional narrowness of the focus on linguistic structures @xcite , and bemoaning the prevalence of linguistic material that is not accessible to speakers @xcite . this connects to a broader program of decolonising research @xcite @xcite @xcite , and building social justice and selfdetermination into the research agenda @xcite . a starting point is the recognition that we operate in a postcolonial situation, where language loss is often the byproduct of oppression @xcite , particularly for indigenous people in liberal democratic settler states @xcite . in australia, "government policies and practices denigrated aboriginal languages, and children were punished for speaking aboriginal languages" @xcite . governments well understood the function of indigenous languages in sustaining identity and connection to the country, which is why "languages are so often the target of oppression in processes of colonisation or displacement" @xcite . language activities have the potential to support resilience and wellbeing, and elevate local voices @xcite @xcite . however, just as often these activities respond to externally perceived problems and deliver "solutions" that create new problems for local people @xcite . in contrast, decolonising practices create spaces where "the oppressed [can] begin to believe in themselves" @xcite . they dislodge white privilege to access knowledge @xcite . they acknowledge that: "indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination. by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development" (article 3, un declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples). what does self-determination look like in the case of language work? "to imagine self-determination [then, is] to imagine a world in which indigenous peoples become active participants" (smith, 1999, 127). as a result, "the community must be the driver and driving interest of the research and language projects" @xcite . indigenous people have the option to abandon their languages @xcite . but if they choose to develop their languages, they have a right to self-determination, engaging outside experts "to support a program or strategy the community has already settled on rather than to develop a discrete project based on [the outsider's] expertise" (bedford and casson, 2010, 80). this latter group analysed activities on an axis of self-determination (fig. 3 ). we can see that self-determination hits up against the problem of accountability for funding @xcite , and cherished beliefs about pedagogy @xcite . the target of revitalisation is also contested. in reality, the revitalised language may differ substantially from the ancestral one (zuckermann, 2020). emerging codes are pressed into service: "while kriol speakers have massively replaced australian lexical forms by english-like forms, they have been able to do so without modifying the meanings expressed in australian languages to the same extent" @xcite . salient aspects of the ancestral life-world persist. furthermore, many indigenous communities are diglossic, using vernacular languages for transmitting local knowledge, and vehicular languages for participating in the national economy and accessing western education and health systems. recent thinking on sustaining language use encourages us to address not the language community but the speech community, recognising its "multiple communicative regimes" @xcite , its "repertoire of languages" @xcite . codeswitching may not be a threat, but it may support the learning of ancestral languages, via the practice of "pedagogical translanguaging" @xcite . in spite of these nuanced understandings of the target, many external scholars advocate for the pure ancestral language, even when this is counterproductive @xcite . here is a place where linguists may have a blind spot, criticising the prescriptivism of laypeople while indulging in it themselves @xcite . "the discourse of hyperbolic valorization converts endangered languages into objects more suitable for preservation in museums patronized by exceptionally discerning elites than for ordinary use in everyday life by imperfect human beings" @xcite . in places where people wish to connect with their ancestral language, several programs have been devised, such as the master apprentice program @xcite . the goal may not be fluency: "a belief [in] a goal where everyone in the community will speak karok to each other again is unrealistic. language revitalisation in areas of language diversity and small populations is going to be very different than for languages like hebrew, hawaiian and maori" @xcite ). an australian survey found that most people were less interested in proficiency, and understood that the goal of language activities was "to strengthen people's connection with their language and culture, to build a sense of identity and wellbeing, and to increase language awareness" @xcite . to be sure, the speech and language technology community brings a useful toolbox @xcite . but it also brings unhelpful assumptions about goals and methods, and a habit of algorithmic and technological colonisation @xcite . how do we decolonise our approach? in australian aboriginal communities this often begins with sitting with people, having a yarn over a cup of tea by a fire. there is no interrogation, just sharing stories about families, the place, and what is happening with the language. we could talk about what it might mean to sustain or forget this language @xcite . the newcomer might share her own family history of intergenerational disruption of language transmission, and what this has meant. such "yarning" is a research method in itself @xcite . in this context, we rethink the goals and practices of technology development @xcite . we may use technological artefacts to prompt design conversations @xcite . we can understand such engagements "less as ways that designers can formulate needs and measure outcomes, and more as shaping and staging encounters" @xcite , an iterative process @xcite . when it comes to capturing language materials, we must take seriously the sovereignty of local people over their data @xcite . in sum, we enter a research process that supports recovery from the colonial legacy @xcite , beginning with self-determinination (battiste and @xcite . ## conclusion for a fraction of the world's languages -perhaps no more than 10% -the dominant ideology is that a language is a communication tool, a public corpus, readily interchangeable with others, raw data for commercial exploitation by algorithms, or hidden behind a "translation layer" @xcite . for the remaining 90%, language tends to be oral, emergent, untranslatable, tightly coupled to a place. representatives from the former may approach the latter with a sense of entitlement: to project, to save, to know, to mine. they may be unwilling to hear local aspirations, unable to see how differently language functions in each place. it is simply a given that language loss must be halted, and that technology is up to the task. speech and language technologists, myself included, have participated in the "hyperbolic valorization" of endangered languages @xcite , perpetuating "naive western assumptions about languages as bounded denotational codes" @xcite , leading to "a puristic approach [that] is antithetical to reclamation objectives" @xcite . the idea of saving languages sits well with our understanding of language as data. it sits well with our belief in technologies as panaceas for social problems @xcite . it even seems to sit well with our commitment to evaluation. yet we do not systematically evaluate the claim that speech and language technologies improve the survival prospects for indigenous or endangered languages. is this a blind spot? indigenous languages are not just acutely under-resourced languages. there is a category distinction, based on profoundly different understandings of the nature and function of language, along with the need to steadily unravel the legacy of colonisation. this calls for a qualitatively different approach, one where we properly theorise the role of speech and language technologies in sustaining language use in a postcolonial world.