Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) is an important agenda across every field in the world. Language as a major part of communication should be inclusive and treat everyone equally. The internet community that uses language technology has a direct impact on people across the globe. EDI is crucial to make everyone valued and included, so it is necessary to build language technology that serves this purpose. Our workshop brings together researchers to research into inclusivity of gender, racial, sexual orientation, persons with disability, and other minorities in language technologies with the aim to build and use datasets addressing the concerns of EDI.

The broader objective of LT-EDI-2021 will be

• To investigate challenges related to language resource creation for EDI.

• To promote research in inclusive language technology.

• To adopt and adapt appropriate language technology models to suit EDI.

• To provide opportunities for researchers from the language technology community from around the world to collaborate with other researchers to identify and bring possible solutions to the challenges of EDI.

We hope that through these engagements we can develop language technology tools to be more inclusive of everyone.

Call for Papers:

Our main theme in this workshop is to promote equality, diversity, and inclusivity in language technologies. We invite researchers and practitioners to submit papers reporting on these issues and datasets to ameliorate the same. We also encourage related qualitative studies. LT-EDI-2021 welcomes theoretical and practical paper submissions on any language that contribute to research in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. We will particularly encourage studies that address either practical application or resource improvement.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Corpus development to include EDI

• Gender inclusivity in language technology

• LGBT inclusivity in language technology

• Racial inclusivity in language technology

• Persons with disability inclusivity in language technology

• Unconscious bias and ways to avoid them in language technologies

• Tackling rumors and fake news about gender, racial, and LGBT minorities.

• Tackling discrimination against gender, racial, and LGBT minorities.

Invited Speaker:

Vinodkumar Prabhakaran is a Research Scientist at Google, working on issues around Ethical AI and ML Fairness. Prior to this, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Science department at Stanford University, where he worked with Prof. Dan Jurafsky and others at the Stanford NLP group, in an array of projects with a focus on applying Artificial Intelligence for Social Good. He obtained his PhD in computer science from Columbia University in 2015. His research brings together natural language processing techniques, machine learning algorithms, and social science methods to build scalable ways to identify and address large-scale societal issues such as racial disparities in policing, workplace incivility, gender bias and stereotypes, and abusive behavior online.