# "It's how you do things that matters": Attending to Process to Better Serve Indigenous Communities with Language Technologies

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.02639 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02639/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14050/) (2020)
- [Scaling Speech Technology to 1,000+ Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13516/) (2023)
- [MADLAD-400: A Multilingual And Document-Level Large Audited Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04662/) (2023)
- [Glot500: Scaling Multilingual Corpora and Language Models to 500 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12182/) (2023)
- [Evaluation Gaps in Machine Learning Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05256/) (2022)
- [Ethical Considerations for Machine Translation of Indigenous Languages: Giving a Voice to the Speakers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19474/) (2023)
- [Not always about you: Prioritizing community needs when developing endangered language technology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05541/) (2022)
- [A Systematic Review and Thematic Analysis of Community-Collaborative Approaches to Computing Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04171/) (2022)
- [JamPatoisNLI: A Jamaican Patois Natural Language Inference Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03419/) (2022)
- [Learning to Generate Wikipedia Summaries for Underserved Languages from Wikidata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07116/) (2018)
- [Dim Wihl Gat Tun: The Case for Linguistic Expertise in NLP for Underdocumented Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09632/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Towards Measuring and Modeling "Culture" in LLMs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15412/) (2024)
- [Culturally Aware and Adapted NLP: A Taxonomy and a Survey of the State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03930/) (2024)
- [What Do Dialect Speakers Want? A Survey of Attitudes Towards Language Technology for German Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11968/) (2024)
- [Building Better: Avoiding Pitfalls in Developing Language Resources when Data is Scarce](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12691/) (2024)
- [Designing Speech Technologies for Australian Aboriginal English: Opportunities, Risks and Participation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03186/) (2025)
- [What Do Indonesians Really Need from Language Technology? A Nationwide Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07506/) (2025)
- [Modeling the Sacred: Considerations when Using Religious Texts in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14740/) (2024)
- [Vuyko Mistral: Adapting LLMs for Low-Resource Dialectal Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07617/) (2025)
- [Big AI is accelerating the metacrisis: What can we do?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24863/) (2025)
- [On Non-interactive Evaluation of Animal Communication Translators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15768/) (2025)
- [Vavanagi: a Community-run Platform for Documentation of the Hula Language in Papua New Guinea](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14210/) (2026)
- [Supporting and Performing Culture from the Inside](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32281/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Indigenous languages are historically under-served by Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies, but this is changing for some languages with the recent scaling of large multilingual models and an increased focus by the NLP community on endangered languages. This position paper explores ethical considerations in building NLP technologies for Indigenous languages, based on the premise that such projects should primarily serve Indigenous communities. We report on interviews with 17 researchers working in or with Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander communities on language technology projects in Australia. Drawing on insights from the interviews, we recommend practices for NLP researchers to increase attention to the process of engagements with Indigenous communities, rather than focusing only on decontextualised artefacts.