Should We Ban English NLP for a Year?

AbstractAround two thirds of NLP research at top venues is devoted exclusively to developing technology for speakers of English, most speech data comes from young urban speakers, and most texts used to train language models come from male writers. These biases feed into consumer technologies to widen existing inequality gaps, not only within, but also across, societies. Many have argued that it is almost impossible to mitigate inequality amplification. I argue that, on the contrary, it is quite simple to do so, and that counter-measures would have little-to-no negative impact, except for, perhaps, in the very short term.