Must NLP be Extractive?

How do we roll out language technologies across a world with 7,000 languages? In one story, we scale the successes of NLP further into 'low-resource' languages, doing ever more with less. However, this approach does not recognise the fact that -beyond the 500 institutional languages -the remaining languages are oral vernaculars. These speech communities interact with the outside world using a 'contact language'. I argue that contact languages are the appropriate target for technologies like speech recognition and machine translation, and that the 6,500 oral vernaculars should be approached differently. I share stories from an Indigenous community where local people reshaped an extractive agenda to align with their relational agenda. I describe the emerging paradigm of Relational NLP and explain how it opens the way to non-extractive methods and to solutions that enhance human agency.