Primum Non Nocere: Before working with Indigenous data, the ACL must confront ongoing colonialism

Lane Schwartz


Abstract
In this paper, we challenge the ACL community to reckon with historical and ongoing colonialism by adopting a set of ethical obligations and best practices drawn from the Indigenous studies literature. While the vast majority of NLP research focuses on a very small number of very high resource languages (English, Chinese, etc), some work has begun to engage with Indigenous languages. No research involving Indigenous language data can be considered ethical without first acknowledging that Indigenous languages are not merely very low resource languages. The toxic legacy of colonialism permeates every aspect of interaction between Indigenous communities and outside researchers. To this end, we propose that the ACL draft and adopt an ethical framework for NLP researchers and computational linguists wishing to engage in research involving Indigenous languages.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-short.82
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
724–731
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-short.82
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-short.82
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lane Schwartz. 2022. Primum Non Nocere: Before working with Indigenous data, the ACL must confront ongoing colonialism. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 724–731, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Primum Non Nocere: Before working with Indigenous data, the ACL must confront ongoing colonialism (Schwartz, ACL 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-short.82.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-short.82.mp4