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1. Application of Speech Processes for the Documentation of Kréyòl Gwadloupéyen

   Le Ferrand, É. ( June 2023 , Proceedings of the Second Workshop on NLP Applications to Field Linguistics)

   Serikov, O. ; Voloshina, E ; Postnikova, A. ; Klyachko, E. ; Neminova E. ; Vylomova, E. ; Shavrina, T. ; Le Ferrand, E. ; Tyers, F (Ed.)

   In recent times, there has been a growing number of research studies focused on addressing the challenges posed by low-resource languages and the transcription bottleneck phenomenon. This phenomenon has driven the development of speech recognition methods to transcribe regional and Indigenous languages automatically. Although there is much talk about bridging the gap between speech technologies and field linguistics, there is a lack of documented efficient communication between NLP experts and documentary linguists. The models created for low-resource languages often remain within the confines of computer science departments, while documentary linguistics remain attached to traditional transcription workflows. This paper presents the early stage of a collaboration between NLP experts and field linguists, resulting in the successful transcription of Kréyòl Gwadloupéyen using speech recognition technology. 

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2. Aerial Flight Paths for Communication

   https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2021.719154  

   Bevins, Alisha ; Duncan, Brittany A. ( December 2021 , Frontiers in Robotics and AI)

   This article presents an understanding of naive users’ perception of the communicative nature of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) motions refined through an iterative series of studies. This includes both what people believe the UAV is trying to communicate, and how they expect to respond through physical action or emotional response. Previous work in this area prioritized gestures from participants to the vehicle or augmenting the vehicle with additional communication modalities, rather than communicating without clear definitions of the states attempting to be conveyed. In an attempt to elicit more concrete states and better understand specific motion perception, this work includes multiple iterations of state creation, flight path refinement, and label assignment. The lessons learned in this work will be applicable broadly to those interested in defining flight paths, and within the human-robot interaction community as a whole, as it provides a base for those seeking to communicate using non-anthropomorphic robots. We found that the Negative Attitudes towards Robots Scale (NARS) can be an indicator of how a person is likely to react to a UAV, the emotional content they are likely to perceive from a message being conveyed, and it is an indicator for the personality characteristics they are likely to project upon the UAV. We also see that people commonly associate motions from other non-verbal communication situations onto UAVs. Flight specific recommendations are to use a dynamic retreating motion from a person to encourage following, use a perpendicular motion to their field of view for blocking, simple descending motion for landing, and to use either no motion or large altitude changes to encourage watching. Overall, this research explores the communication from the UAV to the bystander through its motion, to see how people respond physically and emotionally. 

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3. What we talk about when we talk about colors

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2109237118  

   Twomey, Colin R. ; Roberts, Gareth ; Brainard, David H. ; Plotkin, Joshua B. ( September 2021 , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   Names for colors vary widely across languages, but color categories are remarkably consistent. Shared mechanisms of color perception help explain consistent partitions of visible light into discrete color vocabularies. But the mappings from colors to words are not identical across languages, which may reflect communicative needs—how often speakers must refer to objects of different color. Here we quantify the communicative needs of colors in 130 different languages by developing an inference algorithm for this problem. We find that communicative needs are not uniform: Some regions of color space exhibit 30-fold greater demand for communication than other regions. The regions of greatest demand correlate with the colors of salient objects, including ripe fruits in primate diets. Our analysis also reveals a hidden diversity in the communicative needs of colors across different languages, which is partly explained by differences in geographic location and the local biogeography of linguistic communities. Accounting for language-specific, nonuniform communicative needs improves predictions for how a language maps colors to words, and how these mappings vary across languages. Our account closes an important gap in the compression theory of color naming, while opening directions to study cross-cultural variation in the need to communicate different colors and its impact on the cultural evolution of color categories. 

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4. Primum Non Nocere: Before working with Indigenous data, the ACL must confront ongoing colonialism

   https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.acl-short.82  

   Schwartz, Lane ( May 2022 , Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics)

   In this paper, we challenge the ACL community to reckon with historical and ongoing colonialism by adopting a set of ethical obligations and best practices drawn from the Indigenous studies literature. While the vast majority of NLP research focuses on a very small number of very high resource languages (English, Chinese, etc), some work has begun to engage with Indigenous languages. No research involving Indigenous language data can be considered ethical without first acknowledging that Indigenous languages are not merely very low resource languages. The toxic legacy of colonialism permeates every aspect of interaction between Indigenous communities and outside researchers. To this end, we propose that the ACL draft and adopt an ethical framework for NLP researchers and computational linguists wishing to engage in research involving Indigenous languages. 

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5. Risk or Efficacy? How Psychological Distance Influences Climate Change Engagement

   https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13446  

   Chu, Haoran ; Yang, Janet Z. ( January 2020 , Risk Analysis)

   Construal‐level theory suggests that high‐level abstract features weigh more in people's decision‐making at farther distance, while low‐level concrete features weigh more at closer distance. Based on this, we propose that psychological distance will influence the effect of risk versus efficacy framing on climate change engagement. In particular, risk perception related to the end‐state expectancy of climate change mitigation should influence people's climate change engagement at farther distance. In contrast, efficacy perception related to the perceived feasibility of attaining end‐state goals should influence engagement at closer distance. Results from an experimental survey based on a national sample that is both demographically and geographically representative (N= 1,282) supported our proposition. At closer spatial distance, perceived efficacy boosted by efficacy framing increased participants’ intention to perform climate mitigation behaviors. In contrast, at farther distance, risk framing increased behavioral intention through heightened risk perception. Based on these findings, we suggest that when communicating distant and abstract risks, highlighting their disastrous impacts may better motivate action. In contrast, when communicating impending and concrete risks, stressing the feasibility of action may have stronger motivational potential.

    

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