Technolinguistics in Practice: Socially Situating Language in AI Systems

by | May 2, 2023 | Uncategorized | 0 comments

Looking forward to joining other social scientists and linguists at the University of Siegen in May to present:

“What Python Can’t Do: Language Ideologies in Programming Courses for Natural Language Processing”

[snip]:

Many of the applications that are used in machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) are written in a computer language called Python. Python has become one of the fastest growing programming languages and knowledge of it can be considered a valuable form of social capital (Bourdieu 1977). The structure of Python, explicitly introduced as a language itself, reinforces a language ideology that sees language as a semantic, referential, and universal system (Jablonski n.d.; Lovrenčic et al. 2009; Danova 2017). This contrasts with the position taken by most linguistic anthropologists that sees language as primarily pragmatic, indexical, and highly localized in its ability to convey meaning (Silverstein 1976; 1979; Gal and Irvine 2019; Nakassis 2018; Eckert 2008). “

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