Natural language processing (NLP) technologies increasingly shape public life, yet their deployment for social good remains unevenly distributed across domains, languages, and geographies. This piece inaugurates the NLP for Social Good column in this journal. In this piece, I map the current state of NLP for Social Good (NLP4SG) across nine application domains. The picture that emerges is one of striking imbalance: AI harms, inclusion, and digital violence attract the bulk of research attention, while poverty, peacebuilding, and environmental protection remain critically underexplored. I argue that the field must address three structural gaps, domain coverage, linguistic diversity, and evaluation methodology, if NLP is to fulfil its potential as a force for equitable social progress. The piece concludes with five directions that I believe will define the next chapter of NLP4SG research.

This study investigates individual factors and workplace practices associated with self-perceived communication competence in the workplace (SPCCW) at a university in Norway. Via an online survey, 313 international academic staff members reported their SPCCW in Norwegian as a second language (L2). Although 92% of the permanent staff who responded reported having taken formal training in L2 Norwegian, only 54% of these felt that they knew enough Norwegian to perform their work effectively. Findings showed that, in addition to length of residence in Norway, having a Germanic first language (other than English) was a significant predictor of SPCCW. Qualitative comments indicated that activities in Norwegian outside of work and having patient interaction partners to practise with were perceived as beneficial for L2 confidence in the workplace. The findings are discussed from a second language acquisition perspective and add to our understanding of how the language competencies needed for work in higher education can be developed.

Multiple myeloma (MM) is one of the most common blood cancers. Despite lengthening survival with modern therapy, it remains largely fatal. Understanding the influence of common modifiable risk factors on MM risk is necessary to inform prevention. We investigated the association between dietary exposures and MM in an Australian population-based case–control study (2010–2016). Incident cases of MM (n 746) were recruited primarily via cancer registries. Controls (n 706) were siblings or spouses of cases. We estimated OR and 95 % CI for associations between MM and dietary exposures, including dietary patterns, fish consumption and a healthy lifestyle index, adjusting for confounders. Higher scores on a modified version of the Alternative Healthy Eating Index-2010 were associated with reduced risk of MM (mAHEI: OR = 0·88, 95 % CI = 0·78, 0·98). There was weaker evidence for reduced risk associated with higher healthful plant-based dietary index score (hPDI: OR = 0·91, 95 % CI = 0·81, 1·02). Increased MM risks were observed with higher scores on empirical dietary indices for inflammatory pattern (OR = 1·20, 95 % CI = 1·07, 1·35), hyperinsulinaemia (OR = 1·15, 95 % CI = 1·02, 1·31) and insulin resistance (OR = 1·21, 95 % CI = 1·08, 1·37). There was no clear evidence of association with MM risk for fish consumption or a healthy lifestyle index. We observed an association between adherence to a healthy diet and lower MM risk. Adherence to dietary patterns with the potential to increase insulin levels, insulin resistance or promote inflammation was associated with increased MM risk. Results of studies assessing dietary intervention for MM prevention could reveal whether dietary modification directly influences MM risk.

This study investigates the extent to which language learning tasks in the Super Minds textbook series promote environmental awareness. Using a critical micro-semiotic discourse analysis, it examines 52 tasks from seven sub-units labelled “Environmental Studies” or “Environmental Science” across six textbooks. The analysis reveals that the majority of tasks promote an ecocentric worldview, with fewer instances of anthropocentric, biocentric and mixed perspectives. In terms of levels of environmental literacy, most tasks fall within the functional literacy category, followed by nominal and operational levels. These findings indicate a tendency towards surface-level engagement with environmental issues. The study calls for more diverse and transformative environmental perspectives in language education materials to support deeper learner engagement. At an international level, the findings highlight the potential of global English language curricula to play a more active role in fostering environmental literacy and sustainability-oriented mindsets among learners.

This multicenter study describes the convergence of multidrug resistance, biofilm formation, and hypermucoviscosity in Klebsiella pneumoniae clinical isolates from tertiary-care hospitals in Pakistan. The high prevalence of these phenotypes highlights significant therapeutic challenges and underscores the need for strengthened surveillance, infection control, and antimicrobial stewardship.

Small glaciers (${ \lt }0.5\,\mathrm{km}^2$), glacierets (${ \lt }0.25\,\mathrm{km}^2$) and, in particular, very small glacierets (${ \lt }0.01\,\mathrm{km}^2$), despite being numerous in mountain environments, are underrepresented in scientific inquiry when assessing their response to climate change. We present new insights into the vanishing (no visible surface ice whilst underlain by bedrock or water) of 77 very small glacierets distributed in the Northern and Central Andes of Chile. We also analyse the presumable vanishing (no visible surface ice whilst underlain by regolith) of 244 additional very small glacierets, comprising a total dataset of 321 very small glacierets within the study area, equivalent to the loss of $5.69\times 10^6\,\mathrm{m}^3$ of water equivalent ice volume according to the 2022 Chilean Public Glacier Inventory. Our results show that 45.5% of the sample shrank from individually small glaciers at the beginning of the 21st century, whereas 53.0% of the sample vanished after being fragmented from larger glaciers in the same time span. The observed generalised reduction behaviour and vanishing results after extremely dry conditions at the end of the 2009–2022 Central Andes megadrought. We discuss our results in terms of the minimum area threshold for classifying very small glacierets, and whether their vanishing poses a hydrological impact.

East Asia is rarely identified as a distinctly Muslim space. This article sheds light on the hitherto neglected history of modern East Asia as a site of Muslim activity and encounters. Mobile Muslims, who travelled and migrated to the East Asian space in the course of imperial globalization, often suffered discrimination as colonized subjects, but in other instances benefitted from imperial privileges and protection. The Tatars of Harbin, who came to Manchuria as Russian subjects, are emblematic, but understudied, actors in this regard. The city of Harbin, administered by the Russian-controlled Chinese Eastern Railway, emerged in the late nineteenth century as a rapidly growing transport hub and colonial settlement in Manchuria. Similar to colonial port cities, Harbin simultaneously exhibited characteristics of both the metropolis and the multi-ethnic and multi-religious composition of the empire. This situation created many opportunities for Tatars to seek their fortunes, especially in trade. Zooming in on the Harbin Tatars, this article discusses, first, the place of Tatar Muslims and their institutions in Harbin’s colonial society; second, the intertwining of notions of (economic) competition in the colonial space with ideas of progress and decline; and third, the potential for Muslim encounters across colonial boundaries. Taking into account the Muslim side of modern East Asian history is not only an essential part of understanding the development of global connections, it also helps us to rethink the dichotomy between colonizer and colonized, and focus our attention on the ambitions of Muslim actors in shaping their futures across the colonial space.

Our decisions frequently involve combinations of gains and losses occurring at different points in time, such as enduring early losses for future gains (investments) or enjoying immediate gains at the expense of future losses (loans). This research introduces novel experiments that examine how binary intertemporal payment options, framed as either investments or loans, influence decision-making. Each option comprised two payment components: common payments, which are identical between the options, and focal payments, which vary between the options. Through strategic manipulation of these payments, the research explores how Investment or Loan frames affect time preferences. Our three studies consistently indicate that the common payments tend to be disregarded and thus the preferences are affected by framing. Notably, this remained true even when common payments were substantial (Study 2), and the framing effect was also found in scenarios where decisions carried real financial consequences (Study 3).

Twenty-five years ago in this journal, Hilary Whitehouse described the cultural discourse of “greenies” evident in regional Queensland, Australia, and its implications for educators and students undertaking sustainability initiatives in schools. The present article draws on data from research conducted in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, to show that this cultural discourse persists in regional Australia and continues to challenge educators and students. Data from interviews and focus group discussions demonstrate that teachers and students are cautious about sharing environmentalist views at school, lest they be labelled as “greenies.” The contentious rollout of renewable energy infrastructure seems to have added further charge to the pejorative discursive practice originally described by Whitehouse in 2001. Contending with the “greenie” appellation, and its associated negative connotations, appears to be an ongoing impediment to teaching and learning about environmental issues in regional Australia.

This article explores the global imagining of China as a site of Islamization at the turn of the twentieth century. While previous scholarship examined this fantasy-making among European Orientalists and Christian missionaries, we put the writings of the latter in dialogue with other (Arabic and Ottoman Turkish) discursive nodes and networks in the Middle East, as well as those of Chinese Muslims, highlighting the production and co-constitution of this narrative on a global scale. We argue that by the late nineteenth century the birth and spread of this narrative was tied to the growing acceptance of a particular conception of religion as a classificatory framework wherein ‘world religions’, as bywords for separate civilizations, were locked in intense Darwinian competition with one another. Entangled with narrational processes like the invention of global religions and the construction of the Muslim world, the vision of an Islamized China became a fertile (and long-lived) battleground for a wide range of imperial anxieties, anti-colonial aspirations, and minority counterclaims, many of which we explore in this article.

The pitch contours of Mandarin two-character words are generally understood as being shaped by lexical tones on the constituent single-character words, in interaction with articulatory constraints imposed by factors such as speech rate, coarticulation with adjacent tones, segmental makeup, and predictability. This study shows that tonal realization is also partially determined by words’ meanings. We first show, on the basis of a corpus of Taiwan Mandarin spontaneous conversations, using a generalized additive regression model and focusing on the rise-fall tonal pattern, that after controlling for effects of speaker and context, word type is a stronger predictor of tonal realization than all of the previously established word-form-related predictors combined. Importantly, the addition of information about meaning in context improves prediction accuracy even further. We then proceed to show, using computational modeling with context-specific word embeddings, that token-specific pitch contours predict word type with 50% accuracy on held-out data, and that context-sensitive, token-specific embeddings can predict the shape of pitch contours with 40% accuracy. These accuracies, which are an order of magnitude above chance level, suggest that the relation between words’ pitch contours and their meanings are sufficiently strong to be potentially functional for language users. The theoretical implications of these empirical findings are discussed.

This paper provides a novel description and syntactic analysis of different types of quantifiers in Chuj, an underdocumented Mayan language. We focus on a subset of expressions that quantify over entities, and that have been noted to appear obligatorily in sentence-initial position. We argue that three types of quantifiers should be distinguished: (i) Predicative A-quantifiers, which occur sentence-initially because Chuj is a predicate-initial language; (ii) Focus D-quantifiers, which occur sentence-initially because they are lexically specified for an [A$'$] feature; and (iii) Basic D-quantifiers, which, lacking an [A$'$] feature, have no effects on the syntactic position of their host arguments. We also sketch syntactic analyses of each type of quantifier.

In 1793, during the Haitian Revolution, the burning of Cap-Français led to the flight of thousands of people across the Atlantic World, many of whom ended up in French port cities. The French government decided to grant them financial relief, in the form of monthly amounts of money. However, the administrative category “colons de Saint-Domingue réfugiés en France,” depending on the period considered, did not encompass the same populations. This contribution examines how the requirements for relief evolved between 1793 and 1802, when Napoleon sent the Leclerc expedition to reassert his domination over Saint-Domingue. It shows the passage from legislation that granted relief to all the displaced imperial populations, including former slaves, to a more restrictive law focusing on property owners only during the Directory (1795–1799), and then to a racialised relief prioritising white owners at the end of the Consulate (1802). These restrictions were linked to the sacralisation of private property during the French Revolution, but were also symptomatic of the permanence of a colonial relation between Saint-Domingue and its metropole, leading to the creation of an “imperial nation” in which white owners were considered full citizens, whereas people of colour were relegated to the margins of the empire.