2024/03/06 by Amanda Cercas Curry, Zeerak Talat, Curry, Amanda Cercas +3 · 4 voices
Arts and Humanities · #Second Language Learning and Teaching #cs.AI #cs.CL #cs.CY
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2403.03874
openalex publication_date 2024/03/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Since Labov's (1964) foundational work on the social stratification of language, linguistics has dedicated concerted efforts towards understanding the relationships between socio-demographic factors and language production and perception. Despite the large body of evidence identifying significant relationships between socio-demographic factors and language production, relatively few of these factors have been investigated in the context of NLP technology. While age and gender are well covered, Labov's initial target, socio-economic class, is largely absent. We survey the existing Natural Language Processing (NLP) literature and find that only 20 papers even mention socio-economic status. However, the majority of those papers do not engage with class beyond collecting information of annotator-demographics. Given this research lacuna, we provide a definition of class that can be operationalised by NLP researchers, and argue for including socio-economic class in future language technologies.