Conversational language technologies (chatbots, voice assistants, and multimodal conversational interfaces) are becoming increasingly complex and common in everyday life. Various language theories (such as speech act theory, politeness theory, conversation analysis, and interaction theory) have started influencing their development. At the same time, the development of these technologies is often driven by technology-related concerns and tends to overlook users’ needs and socio-cultural contexts. This combined with the scarcity of human rights regulation of AI, raises concerns about linguistic discrimination, exclusion, surveillance, and security risks. In addition, training data for conversational AI mostly comes from written rather than interaction-based language data sets and often does not include gestural, social, and emotional aspects that are fundamental to human interaction. In the same vein, Sign Language is rarely facilitated. To promote a positive impact of conversational technology on linguistic diversity and inclusion, it is imperative to strike a balance between technological concerns and socially relevant matters.
Our workshop aims to address these issues by using a holistic approach that involves dialogue and collaboration among technologists, linguists, policymakers, and communities involved in the development and commissioning of conversational AI systems.
To foster dialogue towards a multidisciplinary approach to the development of conversational AI that can better serve diverse global audiences, we welcome submissions on a range of topics related to language ideologies and language rights, in relation to conversational language technology and AI (e.g. chatbots, voice assistants, multimodal conversational interfaces).
Possible topics may include:
- Language ideologies in conversational AI
- Language rights in conversational AI
- Socio-cultural context in conversational AI
- Language inclusion in training data for enhancing inclusivity
- Incorporating non-verbal communication elements (gestures, emotions) in AI
- Sign language and multimodal conversational AI
- Audience design in conversational AI (tailoring systems to meet specific audiences’ needs and preferences)
- The sense of human agency and identity while interacting with conversational AI
- Addressing challenges and opportunities of conversational AI development (case studies, models of effective collaborations)
- Linguistic discrimination in conversational AI
- Perspectives of communities affected by conversational AI systems: needs, concerns, and expectations
We invite authors to submit original, unpublished work (long, short, and position papers). Each submission will be reviewed by 2-3 members of the Programme Committee. Participants should format their submissions using the EACL template, available for LaTeX/Overleaf and all submissions must be in PDF format. All accepted papers (long, short, and position papers) will be included in the workshop proceedings. The proceedings will be published in the ACL anthology.
Organizers:
Sviatlana Höhn, LuxAI, Luxembourg
Nina Hosseini-Kivanani, Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine (FSTM), University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Dimitra Anastasiou, Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, Luxembourg
Angela Soltan, State University of Moldova, Moldova
Bettina Migge, University College Dublin, Ireland
Doris Dippold, University of Surrey, UK
Fred Philippy, Zortify, Luxembourg
Ekaterina Kamlovskaya, Translatables