Envisioning NLP for intercultural climate communication (2024)

Abstract: Climate communication is often seen by the NLP community as an opportunity for machine translation, applied to ever smaller languages. However, over 90% the world’s linguistic diversity comes from languages with ‘primary orality’ and mostly spoken in non-Western oral societies. A case in point is the Aboriginal communities of Northern Australia, where we have been conducting workshops on climate communication, revealing shortcomings in existing communication practices along with new opportunities for improving intercultural communication. We present a case study of climate communication in an oral society, including the voices of many local people, and draw several lessons for the research program of NLP in the climate space.

## introduction central to climate action is communication -not only among climate scientists, industry leaders, and heads of state -but across all peoples and levels of society, for understanding, collaboration, and behavioural change. a common assumption is that climate communication consists of broadcast of information from 'experts' to 'laypeople', on the belief that "the public are 'empty vessels' waiting to be filled with useful information on which they will then rationally act", ie. the so-called information deficit model @xcite . however, effective climate communication calls for engagements that connect with people's values, identities, and motivations, through culturallyappropriate language and modes of discourse @xcite . how do we meet this challenge using language technologies? in particular, how can language techologies support actors from diverse cultures and standpoints to develop mutual understanding and respect for each other's knowledge practices, and to work together in devising effective and sustainable solutions? this is intercultural work in that it exceeds the definition of communication as a mere conduit for the transfer of information from expert to layperson, and of machine translation as mere substitution and rearrangement of word sequences to surmount language barriers (cf. @xcite . we, all researchers based at charles darwin university (cdu), are engaging with remote aboriginal communities in the far north of australia. in the course of this early work, we have observed how intercultural communication problems go beyond what can be addressed by machine translation inside the information conduit (see fig. 1 ). the differences can be traced to linguistic and cultural differences which are not well handled in nlp, as others have also noted @xcite . we present viewpoints coming from local communities that point to an alternative approach that involves co-creating meaning amongst participants, leading to new possibilities for language technologies. this paper is organised as follows. in section 2 we discuss climate communication as an opportunity for nlp, focussing on oral languages outside the 500 institutional languages. in section 3 we examine the social geography of arnhem land, aboriginal country in australia's top end, including the various institutional and indigenous stakeholders, and including our own positionality as authors. in section 4 we report on our field-based research including two workshops on climate communication which brought together these stakeholders in order to document local matters of concern and explore new avenues for more effective intercultural communication. in section 5 we reflect on the findings and draw out lessons for nlp which are guiding our ongoing field-based research. finally, section 6 presents conclusions and future prospects. ## climate communication as an opportunity for multilingual nlp thanks to climate change, and to the increasing frequency and severity of weather events, climate communication is an important opportunity for nlp. here, as in relief and military operations (e.g. the darpa tides and gale programs; liberman and wayne 2020), international responders typically depend on english or another major language, and need translation in order to broadcast instructions, or to access actionable information and deliver tailored messages. we assume that there is a central authority which transmits knowledge, policies, and instructions within a multilingual jurisdiction. the purpose is to inform local communities concerning disaster risk reduction and disaster response. communities may need to access help, which prototypically involves an information need satisfied by a response, drawing on access to a knowledge base, and mediated by machine translation (e.g. @xcite . the central authority may analyse social media in order to sense what is going on, and to direct a response to the best place (e.g. @xcite . this is an obvious approach for nlp in the case of so-called 'standardised languages' or 'institutional languages' @xcite , where every language has a standard orthography and long-term institutional support for developing language resources, including systems for text analysis and translation. however, this position does not consider the matter of cultural diversity. what is the potential of nlp for intercultural climate communication? a key challenge is the difference in the common ground, most apparent in the differences in which concepts are lexicalised (cf. @xcite . for example, in traditional societies in australia, people do not think of weather events in the quantitative way that is favoured by meteorologists, such as: "20% risk of a category 4 cyclone"; "90% chance of at least 100mm precipitation". many english terms have no counterpart in local languages, e.g.: catchment, prediction, threat, safety, data, vulnerable, impact, and so on. when the lifeworlds are so different, well-translated messages can fail to communicate, and fail to prompt the desired response. such failures can be hard to address from inside the communication model in which they arise (figs. 1(a) , 1(b)), surfacing as deficits on the receiving end, to be fixed with yet more of the same kinds of communication. we believe that the transaction model in figure 1(c) suggests a promising way forward for climate communication and for nlp in the intercultural space more generally, building on the belief that effective communication is "grounded in dialogue and contextual understanding" @xcite . and so we ask: how do we envision language technologies for supporting intercultural climate communication? here we focus particularly on the question of communication about disaster preparedness and response for remote indigenous communities in the far north of australia. however, we view this as a stepping stone towards the pressing question of intercultural climate change communication. this is no longer a question of mere information broadcast or question answering. it concerns co-construction of meaning in the climate space spanning: housing consultations; communication strategy; policy development; local capacity building; and so on. we see this as an opportunity for a new kind of agency-enhancing approach which has been called third wave nlp @xcite , where we shift from mediating communication to enlarging human communicative competence (fig. 1 ). ## climate communication in arnhem land people have inhabited arnhem land for at least 65,000 years @xcite , developing practices that have enabled them to live sustainably and mitigate the risks borne by the severe weather phenomena that are endemic to the region, including monsoon cyclones, floods, and dry season wildfires @xcite . weather knowledge has been codified in seasonal practices which rely on reading environmental indicators including animal behaviour, plant growth, and atmospheric characteristics. this enables people to anticipate severe weather, and to manage the country, e.g. with controlled burning @xcite . the changing hazards differentially impact indigenous people who comprise the majority of the population in many remote areas @xcite . furthermore, the climate risks are amplified thanks to the adoption of more westernised housing and lifestyles which are unsuited to the local climate and ecology, and to the decline in local knowledge transmission and practice among younger generations. several australian government agencies are responsible for climate and emergency communication in the northern territory (nt): the bureau of meteorology (bom) disseminates weather forecasts and warnings through news broadcasts and digital media; the nt police, fire, and emergency services (pfes) issue and implement emergency plans, hold awareness-raising activites, and train volunteer responders; and the nt aboriginal interpreter service (ais) provides capacity to translate messaging into many of the widely-spoken aboriginal languages in the region. these agencies operate under western models of governance and communication, broadcasting climate messages to remote communities. community leaders have repeatedly called for government agencies to shift from delivery to participation: "the government should not be taking more responsibility. we know our people and we know our land. we blackfellas mob should make our own plan for our people. family still strong and we would look out for our people... emergency planning needs to have decisions by clan leaders front and centre when they are putting plan together; they should plan for whole country" @xcite . there is a tendency to assume that communication issues can be solved by translation into a greater number of languages. for example, pfes is translating educational materials and advisories into 18 of the most spoken aboriginal languages @xcite , even though most indigenous speech communities have a linguistic repertoire that includes aboriginal english @xcite . moreover, communications between western institutions and indigenous communities are often hindered by more fundamental differences in cultures and knowledge systems, which can only be addressed through extended efforts to develop and strengthen collaborative practices @xcite . positionality. the authors represent diverse cultural backgrounds and fields of expertise. steven bird is a non-indigenous australian of british and german descent, and has worked in minoritised linguistic communities in africa, melanesia, amazonia, and australia. his principal focus concerns the design of programs for keeping indigenous languages strong, working in collaboration with remote indigenous language centres, schools, and ranger programs. angelina aquino is a non-indigenous doctoral student from the philippines with tagalog, bicolano, and pangasinense heritage. she was a lecturer in electronics and communications engineering, and much of her research relates to nlp for local and indigenous languages. ian mongunu gumbula is a yolnu researcher and elder from the daygurrgurr gupapuynu clan in galiwin'ku (elcho island), australia. he has worked extensively in education and community engagement over a long career, and has served as a cultural advisor, mediator, and consultant for private and government sectors in northern australia. ian has lived in the northern territory his whole life, and has extensive personal experience of severe weather events, beginning with cyclone tracy in december 1974. we have conducted this work in partnership with the bom community services group, who bring years of experience of engagement with indigenous communities in the space of weather and climate, including on-the-ground activities in remote communities. as this is indigenous research, we have operated under indigenous governance and to met the requirements of the national code (aiatsis, 2022). ## climate consultations in this section we report findings from our engagement with indigenous community leaders. we have adopted decolonising practices @xcite @xcite , and have structured our work around the values of indigenous self-determination, indigenous leadership, impact and value, and sustainability and accountability, while "repositioning indigenous peoples from subjects of research to partners in research" @xcite . this work is an example of 'both-ways' learning involving 'yolnu' and 'balanda'. yolnu denotes the original people of north-east arnhem land, and also indigenous australians more broadly. balanda denotes white people (a word derived from 'hollander'), a label which we extend to refer to non-indigenous people in general (including aquino), when they are enacting western knowledge practices. both terms also denote the corresponding lifeworlds of these groups. we convened a three-day workshop in darwin, entitled first nations climate communication (may 2023), and six months later, a two-day workshop in ngukurr, entitled ngukurr climate consultation (november 2023), as reported by @xcite . here we summarise the workshops and report findings which we believe are relevant to nlp. ## conclusion and future prospects communication is central to climate action, and faces challenges in oral cultures due to the lack of common ground and the limited overlap of lexicalised concepts. a popular approach in nlp is to respond to linguistic diversity with mechanical translation to "conquer language barriers". multilingual models give the spectre of scalability, yet the effectiveness of textual outputs for oral societies is unexamined. we doubt that having more bilingual training data will solve this issue, because of the lack of common ground and common lexicalised concepts. initiatives to collect more climate-specific text on the side of institutional languages do not address cultural diversity (e.g. @xcite . instead, we have focussed on the challenge of building human capacity for working together effectively in intercultural spaces. we have explored several ways forward including: machine translation to assist government to produce plain english, a multimodal semantic network containing spoken exegesis of climate terminology; and an example of shifting to relational, collaborative engagements. with steps like these -and surely others to be devised -we hope to see nlp shifting from deficit thinking to strength-based engagements, respecting the expertise and agency of minoritised speech communities, and their long experience of living on the land and reading the weather.