Diverse Language Communities, Language Technology, and Artificial Intelligence

Steven Bird is a research professor at Charles Darwin University in Australia, having previously worked at the universities of Edinburgh, Pennsylvania (UPenn), Berkeley, and Melbourne. He is a pioneer in the field of language technology, founded the ACL Anthology, and is a co-author of the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK). For the past three decades, Steven Bird has worked with communities in Africa, Melanesia, the Amazon, and Australia on the preservation of their languages and cultures, with a focus on oral traditions.

The event is hosted by Máltæknisetur and is open to everyone. Welcome!

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Summary

The world’s languages are commonly categorised in terms of available language technologies such as speech recognition and machine translation. On this view, “under-resourced languages” suffer from language barriers which cut people off from markets, healthcare, human rights, and AI. The “solution” is more funding for language technologies, opening the way to a utopia of digital language equality and AI-enabled mobility. Yet the world’s linguistic diversity is not a set of language objects to be pushed up a cline from emerging to thriving. It consists of polyglossic communities who have long used vernaculars for local functions and dominant languages for external functions. I present a new theory of linguistic diversity which places the world of vernaculars alongside the world of institutional languages, and articulates diverse language technology agendas that lie within and between these worlds. This work was presented at the recent LREC workshop Towards Inclusivity and Equality: Language Resources and Technologies for Under-Resourced and Endangered Languages (SIGUL, May 2026).