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April 23 (Tuesday) 3:00 pm
Nina Markl (Institute for Analytics and Data Science, Language and Linguistics, University of Essex)
“Algorithmic Language Management: understanding how new (?) technologies reproduce old language ideologies”
Abstract: In this talk, I discuss some work-in-progress on the language ideologies re-produced by popular language technologies. My recently completed PhD research has focused on language variation and algorithmic bias in automatic speech recognition. Building on this work which empirically demonstrated how commercial ASR tools reproduce existing linguistic hierarchies, and considered the gaps in popular datasets used to benchmark ASR tools, I am exploring ways to theorise the effects of speech recognition, generative AI and machine translation on the way we think and talk about communities and their language(s). By bringing together research how technologies and language(s) function in society, I want to clarify how “new” technologies – or rather the way we socially construct them — amplify old discourses through a process we might want to call “algorithmic language management”.