Fifteenth #7.2: To Dr. Halcyon M. Lawrence
Fifteenth #7.2: To Dr. Halcyon M. Lawrence
A tribute to her life and work
How Dr. Lawrence’s research on accent bias and linguistic exclusion speaks to those of us concerned with the exclusionary ways in which Natural Language Processing technologies continue to evolve
“To put upon another an expectation of accent change is oppressive; to create conditions where accent choice is not negotiable by the speaker is hostile; to impose an accent upon another is violent.” — "Siri Disciplines" from Your Computer Is On Fire, pg. 184
Dr. Halcyon M. Lawrence (1970-2023), an associate professor of technical communication at Towson University, passed away on 29 October 2023.
It feels appropriate to write a tribute to her work because so many of my thoughts in this month’s newsletters revisit the discussions and themes I explored in my own dissertation — accent bias, voice assistants, linguistic exclusion, and social hierarchies between regional varieties of spoken English.
Not all Englishes are equal
“Speaking the “Queen’s English” was and is still an expectation of an educated citizen—even after 60 years of independence. Like many in Trinidad and Tobago, I grew up bi-dialectical, switching between the not-so-mother tongue of England and our distinctive creole influenced by English, French, Spanish, and Hindi.” — Technical and Professional Communicators as Advocates of Linguistic Justice in the Design of Speech Technologies, pg. 3
In 2021, my academic supervisor Dr. Alex Taylor, introduced me to Dr. Lawrence’s scholarship through an extended interview she conducted as part of the Machine Listening curriculum produced by Liquid Architecture. Listening to the interview reassured me that my interest in accent and speech recognition was welcome because it seemed to be an under-researched subject for this rapidly growing consumer technology.
Our personal, family and cultural identities are tied up with how we speak. In Dr. Lawrence’s work, she encouraged a nuanced viewpoint when analysing human-computer interaction through speech — a view that looked below the surface of race, gender and nationality — demanding an engagement with the post-colonial, political and material events that have produced the reality of why English is spoken, not only in her home country of Trinidad but in the United States, United Kingdom and beyond — all while spotlighting the identities of Black communities who were sidelined.
“If you possess a foreign accent or speak in a dialect, speech technologies practice a form of “othering” that is biased and disciplinary, demanding a form of postcolonial assimilation to standard accents that “silences” the speaker’s sociohistorical reality.” — "Siri Disciplines" from Your Computer Is On Fire, pg. 181
Dr. Lawrence’s scholarship challenged me how to examine an ordinary piece of consumer technology, such as a voice assistant, and look past its exterior to excavate its political and cultural story, before applying a critical interpretation of what its existence represents. The sociolinguistic mismatches that Dr. Lawrence’s research exposes — of the Englishes used to train natural language processing (NLP) technologies versus the accents, dialects and sociolects that are functionally excluded from recognition — are gaps that re-enact the class, ethnic and cultural exclusions that operate across and within nations, regions and cities.
I continue to be interested in how speech recognition technologies are used and develop critical thinking around why nationality is an ill-fitting construct when so many regional and municipal dialects co-exist in England’s regions and cities.
“[After speaking to Siri] …the issue of language and language discipline [became] a raw one for me. Trinidad has gone through Spanish, French and British occupation, right up until the time of independence... And so to have this single device sort of do all of that work for you in such a short interaction was absolutely shocking.” — Dr. Halcyon Lawrence interviewed for Machine Listening, 2020, 00:09:55 [lightly edited for clarity]
Dr. Lawrence’s home country of Trinidad has experienced linguistic occupation over many centuries — from Spanish to French to English. To speak to Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri and encounter each device’s tacit requirement for a standard accent felt like, in her words, “a new form of imperialism”. In such an innocent-sounding device, we are forcefully reminded that there is a preferred way of speaking to a machine — one that is intolerant of the sociolects, accents and dialects that fall outside of its narrow range, and we hear the evidence of the thinking that uses commercial rather cultural markers as a guiding light for how its listening capabilities are designed.
Dr. Halcyon M. Lawrence’s work has been foundational in helping me refine my research interests, and grow into the researcher I am today. With this tribute, I hope her influence can have a similar effect on you and inspire you to nurture an interest in telling the cultural, social and historical stories of the technologies that surround us.
Her final published article “Technical and Professional Communicators as Advocates of Linguistic Justice in the Design of Speech Technologies”, was included in the journal Technical Communication and Social Justice shortly after her death on 23 December 2023. In February 2024, Towson University awarded Dr. Lawrence a posthumous Distinguished Faculty Service Award for her work in diversity, equity and inclusion.
Explore further
Listen
Transcripts are available for Halcyon Lawrence (Machine Listening) and Lend Me Your Voice.
Watch
In this 2017 seminar for the Computer History Museum, Dr. Lawrence introduces her research on using speech recognition as a Trinidadian national, before shaping her insights around how accent bias negatively affected her experience which she argues is a form of digital imperialism.
In this 2020 virtual seminar, Dr. Lawrence recounts her year living with Alexa. Developing her scholarship on accent bias, we see how accented English, particularly those associated with marginalised ethnic communities, are both socially disciplined before drawing a link to how this marginalisation is replicated in our technology interfaces.
Resource
Dr. Halcyon M. Lawrence on Google Scholar
Read
Essay “Siri Disciplines” by Halcyon M. Lawrence (pages 179-198) from Your Computer Is On Fire edited by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip (MIT Press, 2021, 416 pages)
In memory of Dr. Halcyon Lawrence by KellyAnn Fitzpatrick (RedMonk, 2023)
Technical and Professional Communicators as Advocates of Linguistic Justice in the Design of Speech Technologies by Halcyon M. Lawrence (Technical Communication and Social Justice, vol. 2, no. 1, 2024, pages 1–22)
The legacy and impact of Dr. Halcyon Lawrence by Casey Bordick (Towson University, 2024)