Socially Aware Language Technologies: Perspectives and Practices
Abstract: Language technologies have made enormous progress, especially with the introduction of large language models (LLMs). These advances can, however, exacerbate a variety of issues that models have traditionally struggled with, such as bias, evaluation, and risks. In this perspective paper, we argue that many of these issues share a common core: a lack of awareness of the factors, context, and implications of the social environment in which NLP operates, which we call social awareness. While NLP is getting better at solving the linguistic aspects, relatively limited progress has been made in adding the social awareness required for language applications to work in all situations for all users. Integrating social awareness into NLP models will make applications more natural, helpful, and safe, and will open up new possibilities. Thus we argue that substantial challenges remain for NLP to develop social awareness and that we are just at the beginning of a new era for the field.
Paper Type: Long
Research Area: Human-Centered NLP
Research Area Keywords: Socially aware NLP; human centered NLP
Contribution Types: Position papers
Languages Studied: English
Submission Number: 2822
Loading