Impoverished Language Technology: The Lack of (Social) Class in NLP
Amanda Cercas Curry, Zeerak Talat, Dirk Hovy
Abstract
Since Labov’s foundational 1964 work on the social stratification of language, linguistics has dedicated concerted efforts towards understanding the relationships between socio-demographic factors and language production and perception. Despite the large body of evidence identifying significant relationships between socio-demographic factors and language production, relatively few of these factors have been investigated in the context of NLP technology. While age and gender are well covered, Labov’s initial target, socio-economic class, is largely absent. We survey the existing Natural Language Processing (NLP) literature and find that only 20 papers even mention socio-economic status. However, the majority of those papers do not engage with class beyond collecting information of annotator-demographics. Given this research lacuna, we provide a definition of class that can be operationalised by NLP researchers, and argue for including socio-economic class in future language technologies.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{cercas-curry-etal-2024-impoverished,
title = "Impoverished Language Technology: The Lack of (Social) Class in {NLP}",
author = "Cercas Curry, Amanda and
Talat, Zeerak and
Hovy, Dirk",
editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta and
Kan, Min-Yen and
Hoste, Veronique and
Lenci, Alessandro and
Sakti, Sakriani and
Xue, Nianwen",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
month = may,
year = "2024",
address = "Torino, Italia",
publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.761/",
pages = "8675--8682"
}