ACL 2025finding0 citations
Understanding the Gap: an Analysis of Research Collaborations in NLP and Language Documentation
Luke Gessler, Alexis Palmer, Katharina Von Der Wense
Abstract
Despite over 20 years of NLP work explicitly intended for application in language documentation (LD), practical use of this work remains vanishingly scarce. This issue has been noted and discussed over the past 10 years, but without the benefit of data to inform the discourse.To address this lack in the literature, we present a survey- and interview-based analysis of the lack of adoption of NLP in LD, focusing on the matter of collaborations between documentary linguists and NLP researchers. Our data show support for ideas from previous work but also reveal the importance of little-discussed factors such as misaligned professional incentives, technical knowledge burdens, and LD software.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{gessler-etal-2025-understanding,
title = "Understanding the Gap: an Analysis of Research Collaborations in {NLP} and Language Documentation",
author = "Gessler, Luke and
Palmer, Alexis and
Wense, Katharina Von Der",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.48/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.48",
pages = "867--877",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5"
}