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The last decade has seen an exponential increase in the development and adoption of language technologies, from personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa, through automatic translation, to chatbots like ChatGPT. Yet questions remain about what we stand to lose or gain when we rely on them in our everyday lives. As a non-native English speaker living in an English-speaking country, Vered Shwartz has experienced both amusing and frustrating moments using language technologies: from relying on inaccurate automatic translation, to failing to activate personal assistants with her foreign accent. English is the world's foremost go-to language for communication, and mastering it past the point of literal translation requires acquiring not only vocabulary and grammar rules, but also figurative language, cultural references, and nonverbal communication. Will language technologies aid us in the quest to master foreign languages and better understand one another, or will they make language learning obsolete?
List of contents
Introduction; Part I. Communicating in English: 1. Can we have a word?; 2. Call the grammar police; Part II. Understanding Cultural Norms and References: 3. Reading between the lines; 4. A figure of speech; 5. To put it delicately; 6. Grounded in reality; 7. Internet speak is the best, don't @ me; Part III. Cultural Integration through Language; 8. Can you repeat this, please?; 9. The unspeakable; 10. The secret code of body language; 11. Language and identity; Conclusion.
About the author
Vered Shwartz is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia and a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) AI chair at the Vector Institute. She specializes in natural language processing and has published extensively in top-tier journals and conferences.
