Roadmap for Language Resources and Evaluation in a Multilingual

Environment

Minority Languages in the African Context

Justus Roux Centre for Language and Speech Technology

(SU-CLaST)Stellenbosch University, South Africa

jcr@sun.ac.za

Aim

• Overview of

– proceedings of the LREC2006 workshop on

Networking the development of African Languages

– resolutions taken at the meeting

• Remarks on future development and co-

operation

Background to the LREC workshop

• African Language Association of Southern Africa Special Interest Group for Language and Speech Technology (ALASA-SIG)

– Special Track on HLT at ALASA International Conference in Johannesburg in 2005

– National and international participants

– Proceedings to appear in SA Journal of African Languages

– Decision to interact with the international community via LREC2006

Why?• UNESCO Year of African Languages (2006)

• Challenges in bridging the digital divide concerning African languages (connecting Africa)

• R&D activities in relative isolation

• Perceived need to develop resources and capacity for HLT R&D in African languages

• Similar activities in NEMLAR project – Language Technology for Arabic

AIMS of Workshop

• Develop an academic network for sharing ideas

• Promote co-operation in the development of resources and tools (BLARKs for African languages)

• Facilitate capacity building related to African languages in the context of HLT

Programme• Area surveys

– West Africa– East Africa– Central Africa– Southern Africa

• Projects per area

• Larger projects and infrastructures

• Discussion on networking possibilities

West Africa– Language Documentation paradigm: specific role of

Uni Bielefeld

– Doctoral students at various European universities

– ALT-I: African Language Technology Institute in Ibadan

– Local Language Speech Technology Initiative (Speech synthesis for Ibibio)

– Initiatives in development of morphological parsers (Cologne)

– West African Linguistics Society

East Africa

– Text corpora on Swahili across Europe

– University of Helsinki• Tools: Open Swahili Localisation Project (OSLP) – spelling

checker for Swahili• Tagging tools• Localisation Microsoft Windows XP: Swahili• Morphological analysers• SALAMA: Machine Translation

– Centre for Science and New Technologies & CNRS (Avignon)

• Speech mining in Somali

– University of Nairobi & University of Antwerp• Annotated corpora in Gikuyu and applied machine learning

Southern Africa

– Extremely wide range of activities in South Africa primarily by locals (see proceedings)

– University of South Africa• Morphological analysers for five African languages• Development of machine readable lexicons

– University of Pretoria• Text corpora and spelling checkers• Machine-aided Translation / Localisation

– Stellenbosch University Centre for Language and Speech Technology

• ASR, TTS and Natural language Understanding in five languages

Southern Africa (Continued)

– University of North West - Centre for Text Technology• Localisation, spelling checkers

– University of Limpopo & Cape Town• Speech Synthesis

– Meraka Institute (Pretoria)• Open source software for language and speech technology

applications

– University of the Free State & Province of Flanders• Interpreting services, data warehousing

Southern Africa (Continued)

• Standardisation:– ISO/TC 37 mirror Committee (StanSA TC37) Terminology training workshops with Termnet

Workshop on text annotation (Sept 2006)ISO-Meetings: Oslo (04), Warsaw (05), Beijing (06)

• AFRILEX:– International conferences and workshops

• National Language Service: – National Lexicography Units– National HLT Resource Centre

Larger Projects

• The African Anaphora Project (Rutgers, USA)

• Building an Infrastructure for Collaborative Development (Taiwan)

Decisions taken

• To consolidate an inventory on tools, resources etc. available in Africa by using the on-line ELRA BLARK website

• To set up a dedicated website (Wiki) to facilitate networking

• The current Organising Committee will be responsible for the activities above as well as for fundraising for training workshops in Africa

• To organise a similar workshop at LREC2008

Concluding impressions

• European countries are playing an active role in the field in West and East Africa – to be welcomed

• International organisations are becoming increasingly involved in Africa: – ISCA International Affairs Committee for Africa– ISO– ELRA??

• International co-operation in EU projects (FP7)?

Identification of multilingualdigital text and speech resources

in different sectors. Negotiations / Contracts

Software development: Tools for annotation / mark-updata management etc

Training (Non-formal) of annotators / database managers

Meraka

University C

University B

University A

Resources and Expertise to feed into

National Lexicographic Units (NLUs)

Government DeptsHLT–products for

E-Gateway (via SITA)

Academic research and development

Private sector ICT apps – telecoms

e-commerce

News Media

SABCArchives

Nat & ProvParliaments

National Resource Centre for Human Language

Technologies (VIRTUAL)

Annotation / Mark-up of Digital Text and Speech Resources

(Fixed standards)

GOVERNANCENRF / DAC / DST

SECRETARIAT: OPERATIONS

Central planning & Co-ordination, Consultation, Database Management

Resource backup, Marketing

DAC HLT UNIT

All Gov Depts

Publishing Houses

NLSTerminology

Services

SITA