Supporting and Performing Culture from the Inside

Lea Frermann, Steven Bird

Anthropology and related disciplines which study culture have often found it useful to consider their epistemological and methodological approaches in terms of emic versus etic. This is the distinction between the insider perspective, how the world is viewed by a member of the culture, versus the outsider perspective, the scientific cataloguing of cultural knowledge and practice. We adopt this framework to systematically analyse assumptions in recent research on culture in NLP along the full pipeline of task selection, data collection, system design and evaluation. We draw attention to the `culture of NLP' which shapes the research focus and approaches of our field, and suggest pathways towards a more culturally attuned AI.