Towards Globally Equitable Language Technologies (EQUATE)

迈向全球公平的语言技术 (EQUATE)

• 批准号: EP/Y031350/1
• 负责人: Anna Korhonen
• 金额: $ 269.65万
• 依托单位: University of Cambridge
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2023 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=EP%2FY031350%2F1
• 关键词: Towards; Globally; Equitable; Language; Technologies

Language technologies can now offer effective support to communication, education, healthcare, and many other aspects of human life. Yet, these technologies are not distributed equally. They are only available for a small part of the world's 7.9 billion population, mainly those living in the Global North. This is because the resources needed for them are limited or lacking for the vast majority of the world's over 7,000 living languages. This situation has significant scientific and socioeconomic consequences. The goal of our project is to investigate the methodological challenges in the development of globally equitable language technologies and to design transformative approaches to overcome them, with the overall aim of creating a realistic methodological basis for multilingually equitable NLP. We will first develop an understanding of the (in)equalities in language technologies, and produce a novel index that profiles the world's languages and language populations in terms of their readiness for language technologies. We will then develop new methods for multilingual NLP that address critical aspects of equity (ranging from sample efficiency to modularity, model compactness, transparency, fairness and others), along with a novel unified approach that integrates such methods to support NLP at different levels of readiness. Working with local language populations, we will also produce new, equity-aware evaluation resources that are representative of the world's low-resource languages in terms of geographic regions, linguistic characteristics, and NLP readiness. Our novel methodology will be evaluated on downstream NLP tasks as well as in the context of useful real-life applications in languages that are currently under-served by them. This project can transform the way we approach multilingual NLP, and substantially improve our understanding of how language technologies can be made fair and inclusive at a global level.

语言技术现在可以为通信，教育，医疗保健和人类生活的许多其他方面提供有效的支持。然而，这些技术并不是平均分布的。它们只适用于世界79亿人口中的一小部分，主要是生活在全球北方的人。这是因为在世界上7，000多种现存语言中，绝大多数语言所需的资源有限或缺乏。这种情况具有重大的科学和社会经济后果。我们项目的目标是调查全球公平语言技术发展中的方法学挑战，并设计变革性方法来克服这些挑战，总体目标是为多语言公平NLP创造一个现实的方法学基础。我们将首先了解语言技术中的（不）平等，并制作一个新的指数，介绍世界上的语言和语言人口对语言技术的准备情况。然后，我们将开发多语言NLP的新方法，解决公平性的关键方面（从样本效率到模块化，模型紧凑性，透明度，公平性等），沿着一种新的统一方法，将这些方法集成到不同级别的NLP中。与当地语言群体合作，我们还将制作新的、公平意识的评估资源，这些资源在地理区域、语言特征和NLP准备程度方面代表了世界上的低资源语言。我们的新方法将在下游NLP任务以及目前服务不足的语言中的有用的现实应用程序的背景下进行评估。这个项目可以改变我们处理多语言NLP的方式，并大大提高我们对语言技术如何在全球范围内变得公平和包容的理解。