Language Models as Measurement Apparatus for Culture
Language models are increasingly used to quantify cultural phenomena, but what makes such measurement distinctively cultural? This paper argues that NLP work on culture is a material-discursive practice: the apparatus -- model, data, annotation, evaluation -- participates in constituting the cultural reality it measures, rather than passively recording it. Drawing on Karen Barad's concept of the agential cut -- the contingent boundary between phenomenon and instrument -- I show that the apparatus's substantive design choices draw such boundaries, and that the boundary is entangled from the start because language models have already internalized much of the cultural material they measure. I illustrate this through three case studies on television and film dialogue (measuring structure, interaction, and deviation) and three examinations of the apparatus itself (erasure of cultural markers, attunement to historical material, and agency in an agentic workflow). This big picture analysis proposes a research program that is theory-driven, empirically rigorous, and culturally contingent, treating each agential cut as a conscious commitment, at once methodological and ethical.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
The Idea of Exo-brain
In this paper I examine the process of getting affected by and the process of making sense of non-language sounds and propose the idea of the contextual cognitive apparatus or exo-brain. We are affected by a singing voic…
Cultural Vocal Bursts Intensity PredictionExperimental neural network enhanced quantum tomography
Quantum tomography is currently ubiquitous for testing any implementation of a quantum information processing device. Various sophisticated procedures for state and process reconstruction from measured data are well deve…
Liaozhai through the Looking-Glass: On Paratextual Explicitation of Culture-Bound Terms in Machine Translation
The faithful transfer of contextually-embedded meaning continues to challenge contemporary machine translation (MT), particularly in the rendering of culture-bound terms--expressions or concepts rooted in specific langua…
Machine TranslationValidation of Subject-Specific Knee Models from In Vivo Measurements
Calibration to experimental data is vital when developing subject-specific models towards developing digital twins. Yet, to date, subject-specific models are largely based on cadaveric testing, as in vivo data to calibra…
Computed Tomography (CT)On Manifold Learning in Plato's Cave: Remarks on Manifold Learning and Physical Phenomena
Many techniques in machine learning attempt explicitly or implicitly to infer a low-dimensional manifold structure of an underlying physical phenomenon from measurements without an explicit model of the phenomenon or the…
Dimensionality Reduction