Today’s “NLP@Michigan” keynote by the amazing @MonaDiab77 gave me a LOT to think about: the field of NLP is going through an identity crisis. Many of the deeply human layers of meaning associated with language have been conflated by treating language as “data,” and we often end up optimizing for the wrong things — benchmark performance, commercial revenue & other such narrow objectives. But there are ways to address this, and we can still “steer the ship” by recognizing there is more to language than just “data.” ✨