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Giulia Occhini Seminar
17 October 2024

ECC Seminar: Giulia Occhini

Join us for the las ECC Autumn Seminar!  This seminar, by Giulia Occhini, will take place on 14 November at 6pm, in the Syndics Room, 17 Mill Lane. The seminar will be followed by informal drinks at The Anchor, offering a chance to continue the conversation.

In her talk, Giulia Occhini will explore the complex factors influencing the uneven deployment of NLP technologies. She will present new data and methods to better understand and address this issue, emphasizing the need for inclusive NLP development that promotes global equity. The talk will challenge traditional performance metrics in AI and call for a more responsible approach to ensuring that language models serve diverse global populations fairly.

Abstract:

Despite its broad application in fields like healthcare and education, the benefits of NLP remain unevenly distributed. Indeed, most language technologies serve only a small portion of the global population, predominantly in the Global North. This disparity stems from the multilingual nature of the world, where high-quality NLP resources exist for only a small percentage of the world’s more than 7000 languages, exacerbating what is known as the digital language divide. This gap substantially limits access to essential knowledge and services for sustainable development, particularly for those communities and regions where such advancements are most needed. To adequately address inequalities in language technologies, we argue that we must first understand the complex factors influencing NLP deployment and assess the readiness of different languages and populations to engage with these technologies at the global scale. In this talk, we will propose new data and methods to disentangle the causes behind the unequal distribution of language technologies, stressing the need for inclusive NLP development to foster global equity. Achieving fair, global use of language models remains an open research challenge with significant ethical and practical implications, requiring a shift beyond traditional performance metrics toward more equitable, responsible AI.

Giulia Occhini

Giulia Occhini

Research Associate, University of Cambridge

Giulia was a doctoral student registered at the faculty of Science within the University of Bristol. Prior to joining The Alan Turing Institute, she obtained an MPhil in Linguistics at Leiden University and a joint BA in Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures at the University of Bologna and the University of Upper Alsace. Giulia believes that methodological innovation is fundamental in order to make sure that the Humanities will remain relevant in the future, and she is particularly excited to be part of this innovation at the Turing. Her research interests lie principally within the fields of Digital Humanities and Natural Language Processing, which she explored during her time as a research assistant at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies.