Computer Science Colloquium – Su Lin Blodgett, Microsoft

Friday, November 19

2:35 pm in Wege

Towards Building Equitable Language Technologies

Language technologies are now ubiquitous. Yet the benefits of these technologies do not accrue evenly to all people, and they can be harmful; they can reproduce stereotypes, prevent speakers of “non-standard” language varieties from participating fully in public discourse, and reinscribe historical patterns of linguistic discrimination. In this talk, I will take a tour through the rapidly emerging body of research examining bias and harm in language technologies. I will offer some perspective on the many challenges of this work, ranging from how we anticipate and measure language-related harms to how we grapple with the complexities of where and how language technologies are encountered, and with the institutions that produce them. I will conclude by discussing some future directions towards more equitable technologies.

Su Lin Blodgett is a postdoctoral researcher in the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics (FATE) group at Microsoft Research Montréal. She is broadly interested in examining the social implications of language technologies, and in using NLP approaches to examine language variation and change (computational sociolinguistics). Previously, she completed her Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she was also supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.