This coming week, we are starting off the McGill Linguistics Colloquium series for the 2024-2025 academic year! Our first talk will be given by Dr. Georgia Zellou (UC Davis) on Friday, September 13th at 3:30PM. Details on the location will be announced shortly. The details of the talk are given below.
Title: Linguistic and social biases impact speech communication in human-computer interaction
Abstract: People are now regularly interacting with voice assistants (VAs), which are conversational agents that allow users to use spoken language to interface with a machine to complete tasks. The huge adoption and daily use of VAs by millions of people – and its increasing use for financial, healthcare, and educational applications – raises important questions about the linguistic and social factors that affect spoken language interactions with machines.
We are exploring issues of linguistic and social biases that impact speech communication in human-computer interaction – particularly during cross-language transfer, learning, or adaptation of some kind. In this talk, I will present two case studies illustrating some of our most recent work in this area. The first study looks at a case of cross-language ASR transfer. We find systematic linguistic and phonetic disparities in language transfer by machines trained on a source language to speech recognition of a novel target, low-resource language. The second study looks at a case of social bias in word learning by humans using voice-enabled apps. We find the word learning is inhibited when there are mismatching social cues presented by the voice and the linguistic information.
Together, along with highlights from other ongoing work in my lab, the aim of this talk is to underscore that human-computer linguistic communication is a rich testing ground for investigating issues in speech and language variation. Examining linguistic variation during HCI can enrich and elaborate linguistic theory, as well as present opportunities for linguists to provide insights for improving both the function and fairness of these technologies.
Georgia Zellou is interested in meeting with students and faculty. If you would like to meet with Georgia before the talk next Friday, please email me with your availability by Wednesday so that we can schedule accordingly.