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Impoverished Language Technology: The Lack of (Social) Class in NLP (2403.03874v1)

Published 6 Mar 2024 in cs.CL, cs.AI, and cs.CY

Abstract: Since Labov's (1964) foundational 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 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.

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Authors (3)
  1. Amanda Cercas Curry (18 papers)
  2. Zeerak Talat (24 papers)
  3. Dirk Hovy (57 papers)

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