Layers of technology in pluriversal design. Decolonising language technology with the LiveLanguage initiative

Language technology has the potential to facilitate intercultural communication through meaningful translations. However, the current state of language technology is deeply entangled with colonial knowledge due to path dependencies and neo-colonial tendencies in the global governance of artificial intelligence (AI). Language technology is a complex and emerging field that presents challenges for co-design interventions due to enfolding in assemblages of global scale and diverse sites and its knowledge intensity. This paper uses LiveLanguage, a lexical database, a set of services with particular emphasis on modelling language diversity and integrating small and minority languages, as an example to discuss and close the gap from pluriversal design theory to practice. By diversifying the concept of emerging technology, we can better approach language technology in global contexts. The paper presents a model comprising of five layers of technological activity. Each layer consists of specific practices and stakeholders, thus provides distinctive spaces for co-design interventions as mode of inquiry for de-linking, re-thinking and re-building language technology towards pluriversality. In that way, the paper contributes to reflecting the position of co-design in decolonising emergent technologies, and to integrating complex theoretical knowledge towards decoloniality into language technology design.

Towards Bridging the Digital Language Divide

It is a well-known fact that current AI-based language technology -- language models, machine translation systems, multilingual dictionaries and corpora -- focuses on the world's 2-3% most widely spoken languages. Recent research efforts have attempted to expand the coverage of AI technology to `under-resourced languages.' The goal of our paper is to bring attention to a phenomenon that we call linguistic bias: multilingual language processing systems often exhibit a hardwired, yet usually involuntary and hidden representational preference towards certain languages. Linguistic bias is manifested in uneven per-language performance even in the case of similar test conditions. We show that biased technology is often the result of research and development methodologies that do not do justice to the complexity of the languages being represented, and that can even become ethically problematic as they disregard valuable aspects of diversity as well as the needs of the language communities themselves. As our attempt at building diversity-aware language resources, we present a new initiative that aims at reducing linguistic bias through both technological design and methodology, based on an eye-level collaboration with local communities.

Diversity and Language Technology: How Techno-Linguistic Bias Can Cause Epistemic Injustice

It is well known that AI-based language technology -- large language models, machine translation systems, multilingual dictionaries, and corpora -- is currently limited to 2 to 3 percent of the world's most widely spoken and/or financially and politically best supported languages. In response, recent research efforts have sought to extend the reach of AI technology to ``underserved languages.'' In this paper, we show that many of these attempts produce flawed solutions that adhere to a hard-wired representational preference for certain languages, which we call techno-linguistic bias. Techno-linguistic bias is distinct from the well-established phenomenon of linguistic bias as it does not concern the languages represented but rather the design of the technologies. As we show through the paper, techno-linguistic bias can result in systems that can only express concepts that are part of the language and culture of dominant powers, unable to correctly represent concepts from other communities. We argue that at the root of this problem lies a systematic tendency of technology developer communities to apply a simplistic understanding of diversity which does not do justice to the more profound differences that languages, and ultimately the communities that speak them, embody. Drawing on the concept of epistemic injustice, we point to the broader sociopolitical consequences of the bias we identify and show how it can lead not only to a disregard for valuable aspects of diversity but also to an under-representation of the needs and diverse worldviews of marginalized language communities.