The Indigenous Languages Technology project at NRC Canada: An empowerment-oriented approach to developing language software
Roland Kuhn, Fineen Davis, Alain Désilets, Eric Joanis, Anna Kazantseva, Rebecca Knowles, Patrick Littell, Delaney Lothian
Abstract
This paper surveys the first, three-year phase of a project at the National Research Council of Canada that is developing software to assist Indigenous communities in Canada in preserving their languages and extending their use. The project aimed to work within the empowerment paradigm, where collaboration with communities and fulfillment of their goals is central. Since many of the technologies we developed were in response to community needs, the project ended up as a collection of diverse subprojects, including the creation of a sophisticated framework for building verb conjugators for highly inflectional polysynthetic languages (such as Kanyen’kéha, in the Iroquoian language family), release of what is probably the largest available corpus of sentences in a polysynthetic language (Inuktut) aligned with English sentences and experiments with machine translation (MT) systems trained on this corpus, free online services based on automatic speech recognition (ASR) for easing the transcription bottleneck for recordings of speech in Indigenous languages (and other languages), software for implementing text prediction and read-along audiobooks for Indigenous languages, and several other subprojects.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{kuhn-etal-2020-indigenous,
title = "The {Indigenous} Languages Technology project at {NRC} {C}anada: An empowerment-oriented approach to developing language software",
author = "Kuhn, Roland and
Davis, Fineen and
D{\'e}silets, Alain and
Joanis, Eric and
Kazantseva, Anna and
Knowles, Rebecca and
Littell, Patrick and
Lothian, Delaney and
Pine, Aidan and
Running Wolf, Caroline and
Santos, Eddie and
Stewart, Darlene and
Boulianne, Gilles and
Gupta, Vishwa and
Maracle Owennat{\'e}kha, Brian and
Martin, Akwirat{\'e}kha{'} and
Cox, Christopher and
Junker, Marie-Odile and
Sammons, Olivia and
Torkornoo, Delasie and
Thanyeht{\'e}nhas Brinklow, Nathan and
Child, Sara and
Farley, Beno{\^i}t and
Huggins-Daines, David and
Rosenblum, Daisy and
Souter, Heather",
editor = "Scott, Donia and
Bel, Nuria and
Zong, Chengqing",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
month = dec,
year = "2020",
address = "Barcelona, Spain (Online)",
publisher = "International Committee on Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.516/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.516",
pages = "5866--5878"
}