A Summary of the First Workshop on Language Technology for Language Documentation and Revitalization
This work tackles the problem of preserving endangered languages for communities and linguists, but it is incremental as it focuses on a workshop summary rather than new technological breakthroughs.
The paper reports on a workshop that brought together language community members, documentary linguists, and technologists to address the limited application of language technology to language documentation and revitalization, resulting in discussions and prototypes for nine languages.
Despite recent advances in natural language processing and other language technology, the application of such technology to language documentation and conservation has been limited. In August 2019, a workshop was held at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to attempt to bring together language community members, documentary linguists, and technologists to discuss how to bridge this gap and create prototypes of novel and practical language revitalization technologies. This paper reports the results of this workshop, including issues discussed, and various conceived and implemented technologies for nine languages: Arapaho, Cayuga, Inuktitut, Irish Gaelic, Kidaw'ida, Kwak'wala, Ojibwe, San Juan Quiahije Chatino, and Seneca.