Decolonising Speech and Language Technology

Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 3504–3519 Barcelona, Spain (Online), December 8-13, 2020 3504 Decolonising Speech and Language Technology Steven Bird Northern Institute Charles Darwin University 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, reenact- ing 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. 1 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 (Williams, 2019). 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 (European Language Resources Association, 2019, capitalisation as in original). 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, Indige- nous 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” (Birhane, 2020, 394). 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-year- old 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 …

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