Invited talk
in
Affinity Workshop: Women in Machine Learning
Invited talk (Dr Alice Oh) - " The importance of multiple languages and multiple cultures in NLP research"
Alice Oh
Among the thousands of human languages used throughout the world, NLP researchers have so far focused on only a handful. This is understandable from the perspective that resources and researchers are not readily available for all languages, but nevertheless it is a profound limitation of our research community, one that must be addressed. I will discuss research on Korean and other low- to medium-resource languages and share the interesting findings that extend beyond the linguistic differences. I will share our work on ethnic bias in BERT language models in six different languages which particularly illustrates the importance of studying multiple languages. I will describe our efforts in building a benchmark dataset for Korean and the main challenge of building the dataset when the sources of data are much smaller compared to English and other major languages. I will also share some preliminary results of working with non-native speakers who can potentially contribute to research in low-resource languages. Through this talk, I hope to inspire NLP researchers, myself included, to actively engage in a diverse set of languages and cultures.