Designing Speech Technologies for Australian Aboriginal English: Opportunities, Risks and Participation
This addresses barriers to participation for Indigenous communities in Australia by improving language technologies for minoritized varieties, though it is incremental as it builds on existing design practices.
The paper tackles the lack of speech technology support for Australian Aboriginal English, a contact language variety, and demonstrates through a case study that opportunities exist for improvement by integrating culturally appropriate and participatory processes. It argues that such technologies can provide economic and socio-cultural benefits if risks are mitigated through community involvement.
In Australia, post-contact language varieties, including creoles and local varieties of international languages, emerged as a result of forced contact between Indigenous communities and English speakers. These contact varieties are widely used, yet are poorly supported by language technologies. This gap presents barriers to participation in civil and economic society for Indigenous communities using these varieties, and reproduces minoritisation of contemporary Indigenous sociolinguistic identities. This paper concerns three questions regarding this context. First, can speech technologies support speakers of Australian Aboriginal English, a local indigenised variety of English? Second, what risks are inherent in such a project? Third, what technology development practices are appropriate for this context, and how can researchers integrate meaningful community participation in order to mitigate risks? We argue that opportunities do exist -- as well as risks -- and demonstrate this through a case study exploring design practices in a real-world project aiming to improve speech technologies for Australian Aboriginal English. We discuss how we integrated culturally appropriate and participatory processes throughout the project. We call for increased support for languages used by Indigenous communities, including contact varieties, which provide practical economic and socio-cultural benefits, provided that participatory and culturally safe practices are enacted.