fyi

Joseph

-------- Message transféré -------- Sujet : [2020PC+Board] The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World Date : Wed, 30 Sep 2020 14:40:21 +0100 De : Antonio Branco antonio.branco@di.fc.ul.pt Répondre à : LREC 2020 Program Committee plus ELRA Board lrec2020-pc-plus-elra-board@list.lrec-conf.org Organisation : University of Lisbon Pour : elra-board@list.elra.info, lrec2020-pc-plus-elra-board@list.lrec-conf.org

Dear all,

Hope you're all fine.

Breaking our Summer holidays' radio silence, I'm sharing the paper below, with flattering news for us. My apologies if you have already stumbled upon it.

It is a recent paper, published last July in ACL, in a special theme track they promoted this year, aimed at positive discrimination, namely at attracting "out of the(ir) box" papers, which would have been very likely rejected from ACL2020 otherwise.

The key goals of this paper are "making the [ACL] community aware of the gap that needs to be filled before we can truly claim state-of-the-art technologies to be language agnostic"/universal, and "attempt to convince the ACL community to prioritize the resolution of the predicaments highlighted here, so that no language is left behind."

One of its major, and duly emphasized, conclusion confirms (objectively) what we were (subjectively) sure about: "LREC has been more inclusive across different classes of languages" when compared to all the other top-tier NLP/CL venues (conferences and journal).

All the best,

António

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The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World

Joshi et al, 2020, acl

https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.acl-main.560.pdf

Language technologies contribute to promot-ing multilingualism and linguistic diversity around the world. However, only a very small number of the over 7000 languages of the world are represented in the rapidly evolving language technologies and applications. In this paper we look at the relation between the types of languages, resources, and their representation in NLP conferences to understandt he trajectory that different languages havefollowed over time. Our quantitative investigation underlines the disparity between languages, especially in terms of their resources, and calls into question the “language agnostic” status of current models and systems.

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