Collaborative Research: RI: Small: NL(V)P: Natural Language (Variety) Processing

George Mason University, Fairfax VA

Investigators

Abstract

No language is a monolith. Languages vary richly across countries, regions, social classes, and other factors. Despite recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) technology for translating between languages, answering questions, or engaging in simple conversations, current approaches have largely focused only on "standard" varieties of languages. By ignoring other varieties, treating them essentially as statistical noise, current technologies neglect the millions of people who speak these varieties. This project is creating ways to enable language technologies such as translation and question-answering systems, both to process and to generate fine-grained language varieties. The team will develop computational methods to automatically recognize features of different language varieties and then create approaches for integrating such linguistic information into the models powering language technologies. Additionally, the team will design methods to adapt models into varieties for which minimal training data may be available. The resulting suite of general methods will benefit diverse communities and less-privileged populations that speak underserved languages and varieties. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.