Impoverished Language Technology: The Lack of (Social) Class in NLP
<|reference_start|>Impoverished Language Technology: The Lack of (Social) Class in NLP: Since Labov's (1964) foundational work on the social stratification of language, linguistics has dedicated concerted efforts towards understanding the relationships between socio-demographic factors and language production and perception. Despite the large body of evidence identifying significant relationships between socio-demographic factors and language production, relatively few of these factors have been investigated in the context of NLP technology. While age and gender are well covered, Labov's initial target, socio-economic class, is largely absent. We survey the existing Natural Language Processing (NLP) literature and find that only 20 papers even mention socio-economic status. However, the majority of those papers do not engage with class beyond collecting information of annotator-demographics. Given this research lacuna, we provide a definition of class that can be operationalised by NLP researchers, and argue for including socio-economic class in future language technologies.<|reference_end|>
@article{curry2024impoverished,
    title={Impoverished Language Technology: The Lack of (Social) Class in NLP},
    author={Amanda Cercas Curry, Zeerak Talat, Dirk Hovy},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.03874},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2403.03874},
    primaryClass={cs.CL cs.AI cs.CY}
}