Invited Seminar at University of Turin

NLP meets non-standard languages: Opportunities and ethical responsibilities

After many years of research focused primarily on standardized languages, the natural language processing (NLP) community has recently begun to include “non-standard” language varieties in its repertoire. This opens new opportunities for research, but it also presents unprecedented challenges and calls for greater ethical responsibilities. In this seminar, I will present recent work in NLP for non-standard languages with a focus on language varieties of Italy, highlighting i) the importance of accounting for linguistic variation and how to explore it, ii) the problematic assumption of considering all language varieties as the same in terms of language functions and technological needs, and iii) the need to actively engage with speech communities when dealing with endangered languages to co-design locally-meaningful artifacts that meet their needs and represent their language varieties.