Two faculty members from Indiana University’s Department of Linguistics, Dr. Shobhana Chelliah and Dr. Luke Gessler, were invited to participate in a three-day network meeting at Uppsala University, focused on Automating Language Documentation.
The event was organized by Dr. Eline Visser, a faculty member in Linguistics at Uppsala University, who recently received a major multi-year grant to integrate human language technologies (HLTs) into the process of language documentation, a field that, even today, largely operates without the aid of AI models. This invite-only workshop convened about twenty of the world’s leading experts for a three-day discussion exploring the history of this challenge and potential paths forward.
Reflecting on the experience, Dr. Gessler shared:
“It was an honor to have been invited by Dr. Visser to share my perspective and help her set the agenda for how she ought to direct her focus in the course of her grant. This issue is very difficult--people have been saying for over 20 years now that human language technologies (HLTs) would soon be revolutionizing the way that language documentation is done, and yet to this day, not much has changed. After attending this workshop, however, I am incredibly hopeful about the future. There was broad consensus on what the major issues were among all attendees (such as the need for shared software infrastructure, a matter I identified in one of my works from 2022 https://aclanthology.org/2022.computel-1.15/), as well as a great willingness to combine our efforts to move the state of HLTs in language documentation forward, a matter of critical importance for those language communities who are interested in using HLTs in their own documentary efforts.”
Dr. Chelliah added:
“I came away with new ideas for integrating computational methods into CoRSAL’s ongoing work on documenting and archiving under-resourced languages. I also met several potential collaborators for future projects.”
The Uppsala meeting marks an important step toward bridging linguistic documentation and computational methods, advancing collaborative efforts to support endangered and under-resourced languages worldwide.
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