Papers by Steven Bird
Big AI is Accelerating the Metacrisis: What Can We Do? (2026.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | LLM engineering is at the core of the problem of ecological, meaning, and language crises . big AI is fueling global crises and creating wealth and power for a handful of individuals and corporations while causing existential harm to life on earth. |
| Approach: | et al., 2025, p162ff) argue that big AI is escalating global crises and creating a metacrisis. |
| Outcome: | the field of natural language processing is at the core of the problem . it is being leveraged to create unprecedented wealth and power for a handful of individuals and corporations while causing existential harm to life on earth. |
Decolonising Speech and Language Technology (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Indigenous peoples are increasingly unable to go on without speech and language technologies, says a researcher . a postcolonial approach to computational methods for supporting language vitality is needed, says the researcher - lil'watul Lorna Williams . |
| Approach: | They propose to examine colonising discourses in speech and language technology and propose a postcolonial approach to computational methods for supporting language vitality. |
| Outcome: | The paper reviews colonising discourses in speech and language technology and suggests new ways of working with Indigenous communities. |
Fashioning Local Designs from Generic Speech Technologies in an Australian Aboriginal Community (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on low-resource languages and the transcription bottleneck paradigm. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a spoken term detection system to train a speech recognition system in an Aboriginal community to reach better comprehension and engagement from Aboriginal participants. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can be implemented in an Aboriginal community and reach better comprehension and engagement from Aboriginal participants. |
Centering the Speech Community (2024.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In remote speech communities, people interact with the outside world using a variety of an institutional language. |
| Approach: | They propose to use local languages to support their collaboration in a remote community in the far north of australia to explore the functional differences between oral and institutional languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed language technologies are better aligned with local interests and aspirations than the first author's western framing of language as data for exploitation by machines. |
Bootstrapping Techniques for Polysynthetic Morphological Analysis (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Polysynthetic languages have exceptionally large and sparse vocabularies due to the number of morpheme slots and combinations in a word. |
| Approach: | They propose linguistically-informed approaches for bootstrapping a neural morphological analyzer . they use a finite state transducer to train an encoder-decoder model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on a polysynthetic language's model by "hallucinating" missing linguistic structure and resampling from a Zipf distribution to simulate a more natural distribution of morphemes. |
Learning From Failure: Data Capture in an Australian Aboriginal Community (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a prototype of a language data capture app for speakers was tested in an Aboriginal community . elicitation of word lists, phrases, etc. has been used for decades to collect data for Indigenous languages . many software tools are developed to support linguists' work . |
| Approach: | They propose to deploy an app for speakers to confirm system guesses in an approach to transcription based on word spotting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed app was tested in an Aboriginal community in australia . it was able to confirm system guesses without a transcription bottleneck . the results were compared with other apps in the community . |
Enabling Interactive Transcription in an Indigenous Community (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for manual transcription are often in isolation from the speech community, and so we miss out on the opportunity to take advantage of the interests and skills of local people. |
| Approach: | They propose a transcription workflow which combines spoken term detection and human-in-the-loop to support speech transcription in almost-zero resource settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed workflow is based on two endangered languages with zero-resource datasets. |
Evaluation Phonemic Transcription of Low-Resource Tonal Languages for Language Documentation (L18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Language documentation involves recording the speech of native speakers. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a neural network architecture to model phonemes and tones versus modelling them separately. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves efficiency, minimizes typographical errors and maintains transcription faithfulness to acoustic signal while highlighting phonetic and phonemic facts for linguistic consideration. |
Local Word Discovery for Interactive Transcription (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new computational task supports the construction of high quality texts and lexicons for low resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a computational task which is tuned to the available knowledge and interests in an Indigenous community. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a transcription density gain of 17% in a morphologically complex language . the proposed grammar includes a description of the phonology and morphosyntax . |
Local Languages, Third Spaces, and other High-Resource Scenarios (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In one view, languages exist on a resource continuum and the challenge is to scale existing solutions, bringing under-resourced languages into the high-resource world. |
| Approach: | They propose to scale existing solutions to bring under-resourced languages into the high-resource world by bringing standardised languages into high-level global information society. |
| Outcome: | The proposed language technology agendas address the diverse situations of the world's languages. |
Interactive Word Completion for Morphologically Complex Languages (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | morphologically complex languages have multiple morph slots with large or unbounded sets of fillers. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for morphologically-aware text input in Kunwinjku . they modify an existing finite state recognizer to map input morph prefixes to morph completions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is portable to Turkish and shows that it can be used in other languages. |