"It's how you do things that matters": Attending to Process to Better Serve Indigenous Communities with Language Technologies
It highlights ethical challenges in NLP for Indigenous communities, emphasizing community-centered approaches rather than incremental technical improvements.
This position paper addresses the under-service of Indigenous languages in NLP by advocating for a shift from focusing on decontextualized artifacts to prioritizing ethical engagement processes with Indigenous communities, based on interviews with 17 researchers working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Australia.
Indigenous languages are historically under-served by Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies, but this is changing for some languages with the recent scaling of large multilingual models and an increased focus by the NLP community on endangered languages. This position paper explores ethical considerations in building NLP technologies for Indigenous languages, based on the premise that such projects should primarily serve Indigenous communities. We report on interviews with 17 researchers working in or with Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander communities on language technology projects in Australia. Drawing on insights from the interviews, we recommend practices for NLP researchers to increase attention to the process of engagements with Indigenous communities, rather than focusing only on decontextualised artefacts.