Dolapo Martins, a software engineer at Microsoft, discusses her career at the intersection of linguistics, computing, society, and culture.  She finds the linguistics aspect of computational linguistics fascinating because it involves understanding the intricacies of a language and appreciating the diversity of ways that people speak.

Dolapo discusses the challenges faced by businesses when developing AI-based solutions that can cater to a diverse and multicultural audience. While researchers may not be constrained by the needs of their customer base, businesses must ensure that their solutions are safe and free of any biases that their model may have been trained on. She emphasizes the importance of testing solutions with diverse groups of people to stress test

and identify any biases in the algorithms.

We discuss the challenges of detecting offensive language, and Dolapo confesses that it can be the most interesting part of computational linguistics. She also raises the perspective that ancient Greek and Latin that we know of today is not truly representative of how people used the language, since what we know today of those ancient languages comes primarily from plays and political discourse.