8 accepted papers
How do we roll out language technologies across a world with 7,000 languages? In one story, we scale the successes of NLP further into ‘low-resource’ languages, doing ever more with less. However, this approach does not recognise the fact that, beyond the 500 institutional languages, the remaining l…
An increasing number of papers have been addressing issues related to low-resource languages and the transcription bottleneck paradigm. After several years spent in Northern Australia, where some of the strongest Aboriginal languages are spoken, we could observe a gap between the motivations depicte…
Most low resource language technology development is premised on the need to collect data for training statistical models. When we follow the typical process of recording and transcribing text for small Indigenous languages, we hit up against the so-called “transcription bottleneck.” Therefore it is…
How can language technology address the diverse situations of the world’s languages? In one view, languages exist on a resource continuum and the challenge is to scale existing solutions, bringing under-resourced languages into the high-resource world. In another view, presented here, the world’s la…
Human expertise and the participation of speech communities are essential factors in the success of technologies for low-resource languages. Accordingly, we propose a new computational task which is tuned to the available knowledge and interests in an Indigenous community, and which supports the con…
After generations of exploitation, Indigenous people often respond negatively to the idea that their languages are data ready for the taking. By treating Indigenous knowledge as a commodity, speech and language technologists risk disenfranchising local knowledge authorities, reenacting the causes of…
We propose a novel transcription workflow which combines spoken term detection and human-in-the-loop, together with a pilot experiment. This work is grounded in an almost zero-resource scenario where only a few terms have so far been identified, involving two endangered languages. We show that in th…
Text input technologies for low-resource languages support literacy, content authoring, and language learning. However, tasks such as word completion pose a challenge for morphologically complex languages thanks to the combinatorial explosion of possible words. We have developed a method for morphol…