Modeling the Sacred: Considerations when Using Religious Texts in Natural Language Processing

Fuente: arXiv
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Autore principale: Hutchinson, Ben
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Hutchinson, Ben
author_facet Hutchinson, Ben
contents This position paper concerns the use of religious texts in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which is of special interest to the Ethics of NLP. Religious texts are expressions of culturally important values, and machine learned models have a propensity to reproduce cultural values encoded in their training data. Furthermore, translations of religious texts are frequently used by NLP researchers when language data is scarce. This repurposes the translations from their original uses and motivations, which often involve attracting new followers. This paper argues that NLP's use of such texts raises considerations that go beyond model biases, including data provenance, cultural contexts, and their use in proselytism. We argue for more consideration of researcher positionality, and of the perspectives of marginalized linguistic and religious communities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_14740
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Modeling the Sacred: Considerations when Using Religious Texts in Natural Language Processing
Hutchinson, Ben
Computation and Language
This position paper concerns the use of religious texts in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which is of special interest to the Ethics of NLP. Religious texts are expressions of culturally important values, and machine learned models have a propensity to reproduce cultural values encoded in their training data. Furthermore, translations of religious texts are frequently used by NLP researchers when language data is scarce. This repurposes the translations from their original uses and motivations, which often involve attracting new followers. This paper argues that NLP's use of such texts raises considerations that go beyond model biases, including data provenance, cultural contexts, and their use in proselytism. We argue for more consideration of researcher positionality, and of the perspectives of marginalized linguistic and religious communities.
title Modeling the Sacred: Considerations when Using Religious Texts in Natural Language Processing
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.14740