AI and Indigenous Languages

About

This project is primarily organised with Prof Steven Bird. Steven Bird works with minoritised peoples, exploring old and new practices for keeping oral languages and cultures strong. He directs the Top End Language Lab at Charles Darwin University, which focusses on social and technological innovation for linguistic and cultural vitality.

We are exploring ways for marginalised First Nations communities to chart a course between naive acceptance and outright refusal of “artificial intelligence”, guarding people’s agency and self-determination in the process. We conduct wide-ranging intercultural work which considers diverse functions and futures for Indigenous languages.

Selected Publications

T Hlaváčková, S Bird (2025), Teaching food knowledge through a card game, Language Documentation and Conservation 19, 224-247

B Wiltshire, S Bird, R Hardwick (2025), Understanding ho language revitalisation works: A realist synthesis, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 45 (9), 3946-3962

S Bird (2024), Must NLP be extractive, Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp14915-14929

S Bird, A Aquino, I Gumbula (2024), Envisioning NLP for intercultural climate communication, Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Processing Meets Climate Change, pp111-122

S Bird, D Yibarbuk (2024), Centering the speech community, Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp826–839