We contrast assumptions embedded in AI/ML systems to patterns of repetition in discussions about weather-related risks amongst members of remote First Nations communities. Natural language processing (NLP) is increasingly proposed for use in emergency management. Thus, we analysed how repetition worked as a collaborative practice when participants in First Nations-led workshops in Australia’s Northern Territory talked about planning, responding to, and recovering from cyclones, floods and other extreme weather. Repetition supported shared understanding between languages, reinforced relational accountability, and sustained attention to unresolved issues. Yet, AI systems such as Large Language Models (LLMs) treat repetition as redundancy through dataset deduplication, alignment and preference optimisation, summarisation and compression. This can amplify extant patterns of non-listening in colonial institutions that require First Nations communities to bear the burden of ‘repetitive epistemic labour’ [29] and restate their concerns and knowledge. We conclude that sensitivity to how repetition can suppress meaning is essential in AI/ML design and engineering, especially for intercultural settings where communication is simultaneously informational, relational, and accountable.

This paper presents UD-NewsCrawl, the largest Tagalog treebank to date, containing 15.6k trees manually annotated according tothe Universal Dependencies framework. We detail our treebank development process, including data collection, pre-processing, manual annotation, and quality assurance procedures. We provide baseline evaluations using multiple transformer-based models to assess the performance of state-of-the-art dependency parsers on Tagalog. We also highlight challenges in the syntactic analysis of Tagalog given its distinctive grammatical properties, and discuss its implications for the annotation of this treebank. We anticipate that UD-NewsCrawl and our baseline model implementations will serve as valuable resources for advancing computational linguistics research in underrepresented languages like Tagalog.