AI and Marginalized Languages

Abstract: During the past year or so, we have seen rapidly growing interest and excitement in large-scale language models and their applications to various domains beyond traditional problems in natural language processing and machine learning. These large-scale language models are not anymore just a proof of concept but have been productized and are being served as actual products to millions of users all over the world. Although it is indeed an exciting development, these language models have been trained on a large corpus that may not be representative of all the languages in the world and may focus disproportionately on better-served languages, such as English and European languages. This raises both questions and concerns about the potential for these language models to exacerbate the issue of digital divide as well as inequality and inequity in information access. As a main venue of publication as well as discussion in the field of artificial intelligence, ICML is thus hosting a panel discussion to discuss the issue at the intersection of artificial intelligence, with particular focus on recent large-scale language models, and marginalized languages, in 2023.