What has happened to the gender balance in Computational Linguistics / Natural Language Processing with the arrival of LLMs and a veritable army of engineers and their massive machinery? Is CL/NLP becoming a new male-dominated clubhouse? NB: Unlocking the Clubhouse, Fisher & Margolis. #nlproc #nlp
Is that a fact?
there is something deeply ironic about the fact that computational linguistics has apperently turned out to be very very important for the current socio-technical situation (derogatory) at the same moment that everyone is like "eh, languages are useless"
✨ New in Big Data & Society ✨
"'Missing Standardization': Identifying harmful language ideologies in natural language processing work” by Melissa Gasparotto.
🔓: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
#NLP #languageideologies #Indigenousdatasovereignty
Victim blaming... Muslims praying, women wearing miniskirts, whatever, they're just asking to be assaulted and have no one but themselves to blame.
Ban addictive designs, ban illegal content, regulate companies.
Don't ban teenagers from digital platforms
www.ft.com/content/cf46...
Missing urinal with an out of order sign
University library (not sure if this says more about students or librarians)
Big AI, the Metacrisis, and Technofeudalism
A reader tells me that calling out Big AI corporations is "brutal".
Not the conduct of those corporations. Not the existential crises. Not the full participation of technocrats. Not the tyranny of kleptocrats and plutocrats. No, me writing about it, joining some dots 🙄 arxiv.org/abs/2512.24863
NB:
A national flag should represent unity and sovereignty. Our Australian flag does neither, with its colonial Union Jack and its co-option as an emblem of white supremacy and racial hatred. #ChangeTheFlag
It is speech communities that decide whether to maintain their languages or to shift to a locally dominant language. AI is largely negative because the amount of training data is typically a millionth of what we have for major languages. AI requires standardised writing, which usually doesn't exist.
Of possible interest, @natehagens.bsky.social @tgspodcast.bsky.social
... cultural heritage – and something we should all celebrate.
They are intertwined with Country and identity, and help
to keep our communities strong."
– The Hon Tony Burke MP, Minister for the Arts;
The Hon Linda Burney MP, Minister for Indigenous Australians
www.arts.gov.au/what-we-do/i...
2/2
"It is a great privilege, unique to Australians, to exist with
and alongside millennia of knowledge belonging to the
oldest continuing cultures in the world. The hundreds of
languages spoken by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
peoples across the continent are central to this rich ... 1/2
What if "AI" is defined as GenAI + hype + Big Tech + oligarchs + undermined polities + ...
Apparently GenAI is going to save a lot of languages from extinction. How exactly? Like this? Has tech ever saved a language? If not, why do people keep making this grandoise claim as though it was self-evident? Perhaps it is speech communities that save languages. aclanthology.org/2020.coling-...
I'm wondering why the treatment of gig workers is invisible here @catiemcleod.bsky.social ? It's as though price is everything and humanity is nothing.
PhD scholarship: Safeguarding Australia's Indigenous languages in the AI era. For Australian students with preference to First Nations Australians, working on the ground with remote communities in northern Australia. Likely March deadline for study beginning mid-year. Contact steven.bird@cdu.edu.au.
@ninamarkl.bsky.social
@tisjune.bsky.social
@steven-bird.bsky.social
I covet your thoughts on this @ninamarkl.bsky.social @mmitchell.bsky.social @catlai.bsky.social @tisjune.bsky.social @barbaraplank.bsky.social @jurafsky.bsky.social @alexhanna.bsky.social @emilymbender.bsky.social @katecrawford.bsky.social @tomslee.net @abeba.bsky.social @jacquelinerowe.bsky.social
Big AI is accelerating the metacrisis: What can we do? Read my four-page article, presented in multiple NLP conference keynotes in 2024, rejected by multiple ACL venues in 2025. Newly updated with 7 proposals for what we can do differently. What do you think? Let's discuss!
arxiv.org/abs/2512.24863
Reading the AI ethics literature feels like doomscrolling the most outrageous newsfeed. It flips from the sanguine to the alarming, from infuriating algorithmic solutionism to disturbing insights, trapping attention for days on end. Has anyone talked about the harms of exploring AI harms? 😵💫
Dan McQuillan?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDOU...
ACL terminology:
"Paper" = anything with lots of tables with numbers.
"Position paper" = anything critical or just deeper.
I propose:
"Paper" = intellectual contribution.
"Engineering paper" = anything purely technocratic.
We Don't Trust Those Mobiles: critical reflections on generative AI for minoritised languages and new ways forward. Presentation delivered at LT4All (Paris, February 2025) #IndigenousLanguages #firstvoices #NLP #ethics
bit.ly/bird-lt4all-...
