Featured in ‘Next Big Ideas’ talk at ACL

We wrote a position paper for ACL’s theme session on linguistic diversity: From text to talk: Harnessing conversational corpora for humane and diversity-aware language technology (Dingemanse & Liesenfeld 2022).

We were pleasantly surprised when Thamar Solorio, one of the speakers in the Next Big Ideas plenary session at ACL, highlighted a key line from the conclusion of our paper as her Takeaway Message: “We need language models that are representative of the actual ways in which people use language [and that] give people the feeling they do not have to leave their own linguistic identities at the door”.

Screenshot of slide from Thamar Solorio, quoting the following line from our paper: "We need language models that are representative of the actual ways in which people use language [and that] give people the feeling they do not have to leave their own linguistic identities at the door".

By the way, one of the more puzzling ACL reviewer comments we got was precisely about that line (among others), and featured a serious charge that @a_liesenfeld and I now often lob at each other: 🚨 “figurative language in evidence” 🚨!