@inproceedings{grimes-washington-2026-artistic,
title = "Artistic Interventions for {NLP} Annotation Challenges: The Stress Test of Machinic Glossolalia",
author = "Grimes, Tyler and
Washington, Marshall",
editor = {Hamilton, Sil and
{\"O}hman, Emily and
Hicke, Rebecca M. M. and
Bizzoni, Yuri and
Bax, Axel and
Matthews, Jacob A. and
H{\"a}m{\"a}l{\"a}inen, Mika},
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for the Digital Humanities",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, USA",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlp4dh-1.23/",
pages = "242--254",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-427-9",
abstract = "MotherBoard{'}s Mother Tongue is a computational linguistics and artistic research project that explores a Large Language Model{'}s (LLM) vocal production of glossolalia. Glossolalia, colloquially known as `speaking in tongues,' consists of the human production of seemingly unintelligible utterances. It is, by its nature, difficult to annotate accurately with linguistic features relevant for natural language. The glossolalia-producing system demonstrated here consists of the interaction of 1) a `nonsense' linguistic corpus 2) a micro-controller based environmental data stream and 3) a fine-tuned LLM. While discussing some philosophical and artistic considerations of machinic glossolalia, we also address some methodological considerations for Natural Language Processing (NLP). Using the artistic project as a case study, we argue that machinic glossolalia presents a `stress test' that could inform both creative redirections of NLP methods and the definitions held by the subfield."
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Artistic Interventions for NLP Annotation Challenges: The Stress Test of Machinic Glossolalia
%A Grimes, Tyler
%A Washington, Marshall
%Y Hamilton, Sil
%Y Öhman, Emily
%Y Hicke, Rebecca M. M.
%Y Bizzoni, Yuri
%Y Bax, Axel
%Y Matthews, Jacob A.
%Y Hämäläinen, Mika
%S Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for the Digital Humanities
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, USA
%@ 979-8-89176-427-9
%F grimes-washington-2026-artistic
%X MotherBoard’s Mother Tongue is a computational linguistics and artistic research project that explores a Large Language Model’s (LLM) vocal production of glossolalia. Glossolalia, colloquially known as ‘speaking in tongues,’ consists of the human production of seemingly unintelligible utterances. It is, by its nature, difficult to annotate accurately with linguistic features relevant for natural language. The glossolalia-producing system demonstrated here consists of the interaction of 1) a ‘nonsense’ linguistic corpus 2) a micro-controller based environmental data stream and 3) a fine-tuned LLM. While discussing some philosophical and artistic considerations of machinic glossolalia, we also address some methodological considerations for Natural Language Processing (NLP). Using the artistic project as a case study, we argue that machinic glossolalia presents a ‘stress test’ that could inform both creative redirections of NLP methods and the definitions held by the subfield.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlp4dh-1.23/
%P 242-254
Markdown (Informal)
[Artistic Interventions for NLP Annotation Challenges: The Stress Test of Machinic Glossolalia](https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlp4dh-1.23/) (Grimes & Washington, NLP4DH 2026)
ACL