Language Varieties of Italy: Technology Challenges and Opportunities
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
Italy is characterized by a one-of-a-kind linguistic diversity landscape in Europe, which implicitly encodes local knowledge, cultural traditions, artistic expressions and history of its speakers. However, most local languages and dialects in Italy are at risk of disappearing within few generations. The NLP community has recently begun to engage with endangered languages, including those of Italy. Yet, most efforts assume that these varieties are under-resourced language monoliths with an established written form and homogeneous functions and needs, and thus highly interchangeable with each other and with high-resource, standardized languages. In this paper, we introduce the linguistic context of Italy and challenge the default machine-centric assumptions of NLP for Italy's language varieties. We advocate for a shift in the paradigm from machine-centric to speaker-centric NLP, and provide recommendations and opportunities for work that prioritizes languages and their speakers over technological advances. To facilitate the process, we finally propose building a local community towards responsible, participatory efforts aimed at supporting vitality of languages and dialects of Italy.
Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 26 of its 95 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 20 Sep 2022.
Builds on
26 of 95 references.
References · 26
- 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
- 2019Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scalecited by 3,907
- 2022No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translationcited by 1,290
- 2020Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translationcited by 1,028
- 2016Bag of Tricks for Efficient Text Classificationcited by 869
- 2020The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP Worldcited by 789
- 2019CCNet: Extracting High Quality Monolingual Datasets from Web Crawl Datacited by 544
- 2021Quality at a Glance: An Audit of Web-Crawled Multilingual Datasetscited by 241
- 2019WikiMatrix: Mining 135M Parallel Sentences in 1620 Language Pairs from Wikipediacited by 221
- 2022Challenges and Strategies in Cross-Cultural NLPcited by 216
- 2022Towards a Cleaner Document-Oriented Multilingual Crawled Corpuscited by 143
- 2019CCAligned: A Massive Collection of Cross-Lingual Web-Document Pairscited by 136
14 more
- 2019The SIGMORPHON 2019 Shared Task: Morphological Analysis in Context and Cross-Lingual Transfer for Inflectioncited by 43
- 2021From Masked Language Modeling to Translation: Non-English Auxiliary Tasks Improve Zero-shot Spoken Language Understandingcited by 43
- 2018The CoNLL--SIGMORPHON 2018 Shared Task: Universal Morphological Reinflectioncited by 41
- 2020SIGMORPHON 2020 Shared Task 0: Typologically Diverse Morphological Inflectioncited by 39
- 2022A Balanced Data Approach for Evaluating Cross-Lingual Transfer: Mapping the Linguistic Blood Bankcited by 29
- 2022Not always about you: Prioritizing community needs when developing endangered language technologycited by 21
- 2021XLEnt: Mining a Large Cross-lingual Entity Dataset with Lexical-Semantic-Phonetic Word Alignmentcited by 15
- 2017Dialectometric analysis of language variation in Twittercited by 14
- 2020Reducing Confusion in Active Learning for Part-Of-Speech Taggingcited by 11
- 2018Part-of-Speech Tagging on an Endangered Language: a Parallel Griko-Italian Resourcecited by 10
- 2020Learning Contextualised Cross-lingual Word Embeddings and Alignments for Extremely Low-Resource Languages Using Parallel Corporacited by 4
- 2022Text normalization for low-resource languages: the case of Liguriancited by 4
- 2018A small Griko-Italian speech translation corpuscited by 1
- 2020MULTEXT-Eastcited by 1
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2024: 1.
1 paper.