Lexicography Saves Lives (LSL): Automatically Translating Suicide-Related Language

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multilingual, ethically-guided approach to translating suicide-related lexicography, aiming to support global suicide prevention efforts through accessible resources and community involvement.

Contribution

It presents a framework for ethical translation of suicide-related language, creates multilingual dictionaries, and launches a public platform for resource sharing and community engagement.

Findings

Translated 200 language dictionaries with human evaluation

Provided ethical guidelines for resource development

Launched a public website for resource access

Abstract

Recent years have seen a marked increase in research that aims to identify or predict risk, intention or ideation of suicide. The majority of new tasks, datasets, language models and other resources focus on English and on suicide in the context of Western culture. However, suicide is global issue and reducing suicide rate by 2030 is one of the key goals of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. Previous work has used English dictionaries related to suicide to translate into different target languages due to lack of other available resources. Naturally, this leads to a variety of ethical tensions (e.g.: linguistic misrepresentation), where discourse around suicide is not present in a particular culture or country. In this work, we introduce the 'Lexicography Saves Lives Project' to address this issue and make three distinct contributions. First, we outline ethical consideration and provide overview guidelines to mitigate harm in developing suicide-related resources. Next, we translate an existing dictionary related to suicidal ideation into 200 different languages and conduct human evaluations on a subset of translated dictionaries. Finally, we introduce a public website to make our resources available and enable community participation.