Local Languages, Third Spaces, and other High-Resource Scenarios (2022)

Abstract: How can language technology address the diverse situations of the world’s languages? In one view, languages exist on a resource continuum and the challenge is to scale existing solutions, bringing under-resourced languages into the high-resource world. In another view, presented here, the world’s language ecology includes standardised languages, local languages, and contact languages. These are often subsumed under the label of “under-resourced languages” even though they have distinct functions and prospects. I explore this position and propose some ecologically-aware language technology agendas.

## introduction this paper is about the world's local languages, by which i mean small, primarily-oral languages, often indigenous or endangered, including the original and emerging languages of africa, asia, australia, the americas, the pacific, and the minority languages of europe. local languages are often called under-resourced because they lack what is required for creating speech and language technologies @xcite . some have been called acutely under-resourced, because they are spoken by few people and are rarely written down @xcite . from here, it is a small step down to zero expert resources and the zero resource scenario @xcite . i depict this situation in figure 1 . in the middle we have standardised languages, including 'high-resource' languages (e.g. english, spanish, mandarin, and arabic), and 'under-resourced' languages where there are community aspirations for language technologies, and where commercial, or social, or political resources are being leveraged to create the missing language resources (e.g. irish, zulu). i represent these languages with hard boundaries in figure 1 to remind us that standardisation delimits languages. with standardisation comes writing @xcite , along with a standardised orthography, written literature, formal education, widespread literacy, and mass media. figure 1 represents what i believe to be the mindset of people who are working in 'low-resource scenarios' and seeking one-size-fits-all solutions. the vision of 'language technology for all' (lt4all) is to expand the resource horizon and deliver language technologies like machine translation and speech recognition to all languages. the hope is that, where political will and economic incentive have failed, technological mastery will succeed in delivering digital language equality. regardless of what one thinks about such prospects, i believe that this agenda is misguided because it does not address the ecology of the world's languages. in this paper i describe a multipolar view of language ecology. i call on researchers working on local languages to make a local turn, working from the ground up with speakers to identify new opportunities for language technologies. ## poverty-conscious language technology in the central-peripheral model (fig. 1 ), languages outside the high-resource centre are regarded as deficient. in language after language, we problematise complex socio-political situations purely in terms of missing data, and we prioritise solutions that target this shortcoming. i will refer to this as 'poverty-conscious language technology'. poverty-conscious language technology views the high-resource language situation as normative. it sets up language technologists as the ones who will come to the rescue of deficient languages. this position is a form of eurocentrism, a colonial worldview centred on western civilisation. it is marked by several beliefs and values which i illustrate here. efficiency. the goal of the darpa lorelei program was to "develop methods that apply to languages of any type from any language family, eliminating the need to tailor specific technologies to a narrow set of input languages" @xcite . the architects of this scheme sought to capture public imagination with the scale of their vision: "tool kit would work for every language (all 7,000 of them)" @xcite . language equality. in the present context, this is the belief that languages are equally deserving of technology, that language technology is for all languages. it is reflected in the label "machine translation for all", 1 and in a manual to "help every language digitize and share equally in the benefits of a connected digital world, ensuring that 'no language is left behind'." 2 technologisation. the computer is presented as a neutral tool for manipulating data and implementing and testing theories @xcite @xcite @xcite . we provide computational tools to support language documentation, since "documentation as language salvation has become the operative metaphor used by language experts" @xcite . we might aim to help society directly, allocating our technical capabilities for maximal social good @xcite , using "language technology @xcite the key to achieve full digital language equality in the new multilingual and interconnected world" @xcite . observe that it is us who will em-1 https://sigul-2022.ilc.cnr.it/ mt4all-shared-task/ 2 https://translationcommons.org/impact/ language-digitization/ power marginalised communities by introducing our disruptive language technologies @xcite , while unwittingly reinforcing the centralperipheral model (cf. @xcite . scriptism. there is a position that writing is "a more ideal form of linguistic representation than speech" (or 'scriptism', @xcite . it appears in the belief that saving languages involves reducing them to writing @xcite @xcite . it appears in the impulse to standardise the writing of indigenous languages so that we can apply language technologies to them (e.g. @xcite . it appears when labels such as 'machine translation for all' and 'european language equality' are used in ways that exclude oral languages. ## a multipolar model as an alternative to the central-peripheral model, consider the multipolar model shown in figure 2(a) . the centre contains the standardised languages, i.e., major international languages that are fully translatable. it is ringed by less well-resourced languages, with differing strength of connection the centre. some of these are regional spoken varieties of standardised languages, which include 'contact languages' (also known as trade languages, vehicular languages, or languages of wider communication). contact languages connect people to other linguistic regions (cf. @xcite . these regions are indicated using grey ovals in figure 2(a) . what are these regions? "in linguistic ecology, one begins not with a particular language but with a particular area, not with selective attention to a few languages but with comprehensive attention to all the languages in the area" @xcite . this is a notion from linguistic anthropology known as a 'culture area' @xcite . each culture area contains many local languages, usually languages with primary orality. translation between these languages is facilitated by a shared geography, culture, and lifeworld, plus a long history of language contact, and so we might also refer to these as 'zones of translatability'. i avoid the term 'high-resource' when referring to the centre of the multipolar model as this valorises a particular state of a language. it reifies our technological commodities as attributes of a language. the notion of 'standardised' language is pre-existing, suggests standardised orthography, and an institutionally delimited, prestige variety. it reminds us of the existence of complexities and compromises @xcite . the terms 'under-resourced' and 'low-resource' conflate would-be standardised languages with those having purely local functions. foot_0 "the term 'low-resource language' is a barrier to understanding. it is applied to languages like tamil, with 75 million speakers, most of them literate in the language, and a history of written texts that goes back thousands of years. it is ridiculous to use the same term to describe the 'biggest' indigenous language in canada, cree, with 75,000 speakers and few written texts" @xcite . writing is key to differentiating the two. 4 i advocate limiting the scope of 'underresourced' and 'low-resource' labels to just the would-be standardised languages. i propose that the community deprecate labels like 'acutely underresourced' because they are a myopic way to view the linguistic creation of oral cultures. i further propose that we retire the sense of 'zero resource scenario' when referring to local languages (as distinct from child language acquisition). the 'local' descriptor might also supersede others such as 'heritage', 'indigenous', 'endangered', 'threatened', or 'unwritten', which may be seen as valorising, pejorative, or eurocentric (cf. @xcite . the 'local' descriptor is apt in reminding us of the local lifeworld and culture area. in observing three primary linguistic spaces, i do not seek to confine a given language to one of the three spaces. local languages have diasporas, such as the nahuatl, quechua and hawaiian communities in new york @xcite . regional spoken varieties of a single language may have markedly different functions in different culture areas, e.g. spanish in mexico vs new mexico (cf. @xcite . language development efforts may bring local languages into the centre without compromising their local functions. even the term 'local language' is problematic insofar as it seems to individuate bounded, homogeneous varieties. if the boundary of a language is unclear, it is not because western science has not finished its job, but because human languages are not bounded codes in the first place @xcite . diversity within a single language is sometimes problematised as deficit: "lack of an orthographic normalization... large dialectal variation, and missing standardization" @xcite , yet this diversity within a language is the natural state and only a problem for those who would seek to scale technologies built on the assumptions of a standardised language. finally, the 'zero resource scenario' builds in another eurocentrism which needs to be rooted out. it is the positivist position that we arrive at true knowledge by induction, generalising over cases. when we look at local languages and ask what we can be sure of having for our general purpose models, the answer is raw speech with translations, i.e., the zero resource scenario. this is a lowestcommon-denominator approach, and it inevitably brings us back to poverty-conscious language technology. researchers in the centre need new ways of learning technology lessons concerning local languages (cf. sec. 5). ## language technology agendas the multipolar model presents an opportunity to consider the agenda of language technology in three primary linguistic spaces. the first space is the global information society, with its standardised and would-be standardised languages (sec. 4.1). the second space consists of the culture areas, their local languages, and primary orality (sec. 4.2). the third space is where the first and second spaces intersect. here we have contact languages, along with local languages undergoing active development (sec. 4.3). we consider each of these in turn. ## stories of expertise in a third space the perspective i have articulated in this paper has arisen from living and working in a kunwinjkuspeaking community situated in arnhem land, aboriginal country in the far north of australia (cf. fig 2(b) ). here my attempts to pursue my eurocentric practices in data collection have foundered. over a period of several years, and with the patient guidance of many local people, i, a westerneducated middle-aged white male, have learnt about the local lifeworld, glimpsed local expertise, and borne witness to systemic injustice. in this section, i describe local responses to western academic practices in transcription and transla-tion, practices where the agendas of language technology and language documentation fortuitously align. from my centralised perspective, the task of rendering speech into text, and the task of translating that text into another language, are disjoint. the technologies of speech recognition and machine translation are similarly distinct. however, i found that matters were different at the local level. the task of working together on a recording and deciding what was said turns out to be a two-way practice that merges transcription and translation (sec. 5.1). the task of working together on an emergency broadcast to interpret it into a local language turns out not to be conventional one-shot translation of a fixed message but a two-way practice of "understanding the true stories" (sec. 5.2). i recount these experiences to reveal the contingent, situated nature of work in a third space, and to suggest that a suitable way to learn lessons from such stories is not induction to lowest common denominator scenarios leading to one-size-fits-all solutions, but abduction to deeper accounts of speech communities and language technologies. ## conclusion the field of language technology has placed the world's languages on a spectrum according to the available machine-readable resources, a selfserving position that i have called poverty conscious language technology. our category of 'under-resourced' languages conflates the qualitatively different situations of local languages and would-be standardised languages. our talk of technology for languages of any type and of language technology for all betrays our eurocentrism. when we speak of 'acutely under-resourced' languages and 'zero expert resources' we commit an epistemic injustice. i have described a multipolar model which respects local language ecologies with their orality and multilingualism, and i have articulated implications for the agenda of language technology. i have suggested ways that we can take a local turn and work with local speech communities from the ground up. we still need to be on guard for the colonial impulse in its many guises (cf. @xcite . we still need to properly theorise language technology development outside the space of standardised languages. the result of this program, i hope, will be language technologies that address the distinct opportunities presented in three high-resource scenarios: the global information society with its standardised languages, the culture areas with their local languages, and their intersection in third spaces with their contact languages and local language development activities.