Event (Workshop talk)
2024-07-05
The Resource Debate in Machine Translation and Large Language Models
Paolo Caffoni presents at and chairs a workshop organised as a collaboration between the KIM research group and the AIModels project at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
Workshop description
The interdisciplinary workshop explores how the concept of extinction influences the apparatuses of boundary-making in both linguistics and natural sciences. Today, the pressing issue of language and species endangerment is prominently featured on the agendas of nation states, international organisations, and hi-tech corporations. This attention is driven by an extensive use of big data and statistical modelling both in Natural Language Processing (see: Digital Language Death, Kornai 2013) and representing current and past mass (biological) extinction events (Foster WJ et al., 2023). In the 19th century, mass species extinction was initially brought to light through statistical modelling within the emerging field of palaeontology. In the second half of the 20th century, the term biocultural diversity emerged from a new appraisal of extinction as a threat to both biological and cultural resources (Sepkoski 2020). Subsequently, the comprehension of extinction evolved into a problem of computing risk and the extinction of species and languages: it transitioned from naturalizing the colonial ecocide and genocide to organizing biological and cultural diversity into taxonomies of endangerment (Baldwin et al. 2018). The workshop addresses the notion of extinction of languages and biological life in the current political and academic landscape and considers whether the categories of national tongues and enclosures can be applied to these human and nonhuman, digital and offline modes of accumulation.
Workshop participants
- Chair: Paolo Caffoni and Mariana Silva, HfG Karlsruhe
- Mariana Silva, HfG Karlsruhe, ‘Extinction’s Beasts of Burden: Modeling Risk’
- Paolo Caffoni, HfG Karlsruhe, ‘The Resource Debate in Machine Translation and Large Language Models’
- Boris Buden, HfG Karlsruhe, ‘Digital Extinction of Languages and the Politics of Translation’
- Britta Schneider, Europa-Universität Viadrina, ‘Which Language is Endangered in the Age of AI Models?’
- Paulette Steeves, Algoma University, ‘Contesting Extinction in the Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere’
- Julian Asbäck, HfG Karlsruhe, ‘Simulating the Apocalypse: On the Language of Uncertainty in Climate Modelling’
- Marco Tamborini, Technische Universität Darmstadt, ‘The Circulation of Morphological Knowledge’
- Discussants: Giulia Rispoli and Matteo Pasquinelli, Ca’ Foscari University; Tommaso Guariento, independent scholar
