Miles Thorogood


2024

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Seeding Alignment between Language Technology and Indigenous Methodologies: A Decolonizing Framework for Endangered Language Revitalization
Craig John Carpenter | John Lyon | Miles Thorogood | Jeannette C. Armstrong
Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Under-resourced Languages @ LREC-COLING 2024

The integration of a speech technology into a digital edition to support the acquisition of a critically endangered Indigenous language is a complex task. More than simply consisting of technical challenges of working with an under-resourced language, researchers face the potential of re-enacting causes of language endangerment without rigorous adherence to qualitative methodologies. Based on reflections throughout the development process of a speech technology, this paper proposes a cross-disciplinary decolonizing framework for researchers working in the field of computational linguistics for Indigenous Language Revitalization (ILR). The authors propose a series of qualitative methodologies to ensure alignment with the language community which the technology is intended to benefit. The proposed relational framework is designed to sustain the integrity of the Four Rs: a series of principles first presented by Verna J. Kirkness and Ray Barnhardt in their 1991 article, “First Nations and Higher Education: The Four R’s - Respect, Relevance, Reciprocity, Responsibility”.