Are We Conditioning Our Children to Accept Biases?

Thunder Talk

Language being the center of human interactions can be used affirmatively or destructively. It’s usage forms the basis of our societies, our stories and our narratives. When children grow up in a world where the stories consistently entitle them or belittle them, they will internalize these beliefs without question. NLP considerably automates the analysis that is paramount to setting the world right when it comes to these societal beliefs. NLP has the potential to be an excellent equalizer. Most children pick up notions from their educational texts and the rules at their educational institute. Thus, analyzing, identifying and eliminating cultural biases in the literature used to educate would be among the first steps to fostering an equal world. This presentation has an interdisciplinary basis, borrowing concepts from psychology, linguistics, literature, statistics and computer science.

Presented by

Aroma Rodrigues

Aroma Rodrigues is a software engineer working at JP Morgan Chase. As a techno-activist she has been a part of many projects that promote diversity and inclusion. She believes that Automation is the path to Inclusion. In 2016, a teammate of her "Shoes for the Visually Impaired" project presented it at the FOSSASIA. She reads, writes and enjoys walking to explore places. She presently works in a financial services firm and believes that solving problems that she has would solve problems for a large chunk of the world. An ML enthusiast she has about 20+ Coursera Certifications with the respective project work to support her learning in that field. She presented a talk on “De-mystifying Terms and Conditions using NLP” at PyCon 2018 and a talk called “Propaganda Detection in Fake News using Natural Language Processing” at PyCon ZA 2019 in Johannesburg.