The Master’s Program in Linguistics, Faculty of Cultural Sciences Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM), held a public lecture titled “Outside Perspectives: Language Classification in Multilingual Oral Corpora” at the R. Soegondo Auditorium. The event welcomed both the academic community and the general public, featuring Dr. Zara Maxwell-Smith, Lecturer in Indonesian Studies at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS), UNSW Canberra, as the keynote speaker.
The lecture was officially opened by Prof. Dr. Suhandano, M.A., Head of the Linguistics Master’s Program. In his remarks, he encouraged participants to collaborate in advancing linguistic research and to take full advantage of the opportunity to learn from the invited speaker.
In her presentation, Dr. Maxwell-Smith highlighted the major challenges of building a multilingual oral corpus. She explained that such corpora are difficult to annotate and describe, noting obstacles such as managing non-verbal signals, converting oral communication into cross-linguistic written systems, transcriber subjectivity, and the extensive time required for manual transcription.
She then presented findings from her research on Indonesian language teaching for non-native speakers (BIPA) in classroom settings. According to her, teacher speech is a professional practice that carries risks if not managed carefully, as training data may shape perceptions of teaching practices as well as teachers’ own understanding of their work. She emphasized the importance of employing sensitive approaches to prevent negative impacts on the professional reputation of educators.
Despite these challenges, Dr. Maxwell-Smith also emphasized the empirical benefits of the research. Her findings can inform teachers, curriculum developers, researchers, and policymakers. More broadly, the study contributes to the improvement of Indonesian language teaching, provides resources for bilingual NLP development, and positions education at the core of NLP technology applications.