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

   https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.fieldmatters-1.2  

   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. A values-centered relational science model: supporting Indigenous rights and reconciliation in research

   https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-14768-290211  

   David-Chavez, Dominique; Gavin, Michael; Ortiz, Norma; Valdez, Shelly; Carroll, Stephanie (January 2024, Ecology and Society)

   This material is primarily based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (grant no. DGE-1321845). Addressing complex social-ecological issues requires all relevant sources of knowledge and data, especially those held by communities who remain close to the land. Centuries of oppression, extractive research practices, and misrepresentation have hindered balanced knowledge exchange with Indigenous communities and inhibited innovation and problem-solving capacity in all scientific fields. A recent shift in the research landscape reflects a growing interest in engaging across diverse communities and ways of knowing. Scientific discussions increasingly highlight the inherent value of Indigenous environmental ethics frameworks and processes as the original roadmaps for sustainable development planning, including their potential in addressing the climate crisis and related social and environmental concerns. Momentum in this shift is also propelled by an increasing body of research evidencing the role of Indigenous land stewardship for maintaining ecological health and biodiversity. However, a key challenge straining this movement lies rooted in colonial residue and ongoing actions that suppress and co-opt Indigenous knowledge systems. Scientists working with incomplete datasets privilege a handful of narratives, conceptual understandings, languages, and historical contexts, while failing to engage thousands of collective bodies of intergenerational, place-based knowledge systems. The current dominant colonial paradigm in scientific research risks continued harmful impacts to Indigenous communities that sustain diverse knowledge systems. Here, we outline how ethical standards in researcher practice can be raised in order to reconcile colonial legacies and ongoing settler colonial practices. We synthesize across Indigenous and community-based research protocols and frameworks, transferring knowledge across disciplines, and ground truthing methods and processes in our own practice, to present a relational science working model for supporting Indigenous rights and reconciliation in research. We maintain that core Indigenous values of integrity, respect, humility, and reciprocity should shape researcher responsibilities and methods applied in order to raise ethical standards and long-term relational accountability regarding Indigenous lands, rights, communities, and our shared futures. 

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3. Ancestral Computing for Sustainability: Centering Indigenous Epistemologies in Researching Computer Science Education

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-022-00820-y  

   López-Quiñones, Alyssa; Martinez-Lopez, Marlen; Moreno Sandoval, Cueponcaxochitl D.; Carroll-Miranda, Joseph; Lindala, April E.; Chatman, Michelle C.; Fleming, Jeffery; Shockley, Ebony Terrell; Cadeau, Denise; Flores-Reyes, Elizabeth (January 2023, TechTrends)

   Michael Lachney and Aman Yadav, Special issue (Ed.)

   This article offers Ancestral Computing for Sustainability (ACS) to dismantle the logics of settler colonialism that affect accessibility, identities, and epistemologies of computer science education (CSE). ACS centers Indigenous epistemologies in researching CSE across four public universities in the United States. This paper describes Ancestral Computing for Sustainability and explores reflections of two students engaging as researchers in ACS inquiry. Drawing on Indigenous methodologies and Participatory Action Research, they share their reflections as co-researchers in ACS through storywork. These critical reflections include their relationship to computing, observations of the interdependent work within ACS, ethics and sustainability, and their experiences within the focus groups. The article ends with recommendations for furthering ACS as a decolonial approach that centers Indigenous epistemologies in CSE. Recommendations for CSE education include Ancestral Knowledge Systems and adding sustainability as a topic within computing education pathways and building student-faculty relationships based on trust is recommended to foster students’ academic and personal growth within CSE education and research. 

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4. NollySenti: Leveraging Transfer Learning and Machine Translation for Nigerian Movie Sentiment Classification

   Shode I.A., Adelani D.I. (August 2023, 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL’23))

   Africa has over 2000 indigenous languages but they are under-represented in NLP research due to lack of datasets. In recent years, there have been progress in developing labelled corpora for African languages. However, they are often available in a single domain and may not generalize to other domains. In this paper, we focus on the task of sentiment classification for cross-domain adaptation. We create a new dataset, NollySenti—based on the Nollywood movie reviews for five languages widely spoken in Nigeria (English, Hausa, Igbo, Nigerian-Pidgin, and Yorùbá). We provide an extensive empirical evaluation using classical machine learning methods and pre-trained language models. Leveraging transfer learning, we compare the performance of cross-domain adaptation from Twitter domain, and cross-lingual adaptation from English language. Our evaluation shows that transfer from English in the same target domain leads to more than 5% improvement in accuracy compared to transfer from Twitter in the same language. To further mitigate the domain difference, we leverage machine translation (MT) from English to other Nigerian languages, which leads to a further improvement of 7% over cross-lingual evaluation. While MT to low-resource languages are often of low quality, through human evaluation, we show that most of the translated sentences preserve the sentiment of the original English reviews. 

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5. Conceptualizing Settler Colonialism in Nicaragua

   Mayer, Joshua L. (April 2021, Urban anthropology and studies of cultural systems and world economic development)

   null (Ed.)

   A growing body of literature has argued for the reconceptualization of Latin America as a settler colony. Contrary to the self-proclaimed decolonization of Latin American states upon their independence two centuries ago, the settlers who came to Latin America stayed and preserved the structure of settler colonialism to the present day. This article analyzes the case of Nicaragua through the conceptual frame of settler colonialism and examines an apt case study: the Indigenous and Afrodescendant communities of the Rama-Kriol Territory in southeastern Nicaragua, where I have conducted activist ethnographic research since 2014. The ongoing colonization of the Rama-Kriol Territory exhibits not only failures of the state to enforce legal protections of multicultural rights, but also the extension of a colonial logic of dispossession and elimination. The case of the Rama-Kriol Territory demonstrates the entanglements of Nicaraguan settler colonialism with international institutions, development banks, multinational corporations, and settler colonial projects around the world. I conclude that social science researchers should attend to continuing and emergent forms of Indigenous sovereignty in Nicaragua. Amid the fading backdrop of liberal multiculturalism in Latin America, these assertions of sovereignty pose a political horizon of decolonization and an end to settler violence, dispossession, and domination. 

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