Jenny Jones

Research keywords: Multilingualism, linguistic justice, fairness

Bio:

Jenny holds a BA in Music Composition from Dartington College of Arts, which stimulated her interest in collaborative projects, cultural studies and the questioning of dominant discourses. Thirty years on, in 2024, she completed an MSc in Developmental Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, after having spent more than two decades living in Catalonia, Spain, and raising two multilingual children. She has worked extensively as a teacher, teacher trainer, mentor and translator, which has given her a variety of perspectives on how languages are learned and used, as well as how they relate to our identities and experiences.

Before starting her PhD, she worked as a Research Assistant under Dr April Bailey at the University of Edinburgh, using computational linguistics methods to investigate questions of gender bias in collective concepts of personal autonomy. This project developed to include an exploration of gender associations and autonomy in Transformer LLMs, with a view to extending this to multiple languages. Alongside this, with Prof Antonella Sorace at Bilingualism Matters, she led a mixed methods study into multilingualism in Scottish primary schools.
This diverse range of experiences has served to inform her understanding of the critical importance of respecting and preserving linguistic diversity and linguistic justice in AI systems.

PhD research:

Jenny’s research investigates how current multilingual LLMs reproduce and reinforce cultural, conceptual and epistemological norms from an anglocentric perspective, by evaluating fairness methodologies currently used to measure bias. She aims to explore more inclusive and accountable systems that adequately assess model reliability and fairness and take underrepresented languages into consideration.

Supervisors: April Bailey, Holly Branigan, Zeerak Talat