Introduction to the special issue on African Language Technology

This Special Issue contains three papers that are extended versions of abstracts presented at the Seventh Swedish Language Technology Conference (SLTC 2018), held at Stockholm University 8-9 November 2018.1 SLTC 2018 received 34 submissions, of which 31 were accepted for presentation. The number of registered participants was 113, including both attendees at SLTC 2018 and two co-located workshops that took place on 7 November. 32 participants were internationally affiliated, of which 14 were from outside the Nordic countries. Overall participation was thus on a par with previous editions of SLTC, but international participation was higher.

Download Full-text

Spoken word corpus and dictionary definition for an African language

Journal of Data Mining & Digital Humanities ◽

10.46298/jdmdh.6703 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol Special Issue on Collecting,... (Digital humanities in...) ◽

Author(s):

Wanjiku Nganga ◽

Ikechukwu Achebe

Keyword(s):

Oral Tradition ◽

Spoken Word ◽

African Language ◽

Oral Culture ◽

Standard Practice ◽

African Languages ◽

Language Technology ◽

Technology Tools ◽

Oral Cultures

The preservation of languages is critical to maintaining and strengthening the cultures and identities of communities, and this is especially true for under-resourced languages with a predominantly oral culture. Most African languages have a relatively short literary past, and as such the task of dictionary making cannot rely on textual corpora as has been the standard practice in lexicography. This paper emphasizes the significance of the spoken word and the oral tradition as repositories of vocabulary, and argues that spoken word corpora greatly outweigh the value of printed texts for lexicography. We describe a methodology for creating a digital dialectal dictionary for the Igbo language from such a spoken word corpus. We also highlight the language technology tools and resources that have been created to support the transcription of thousands of hours of Igbo speech and the subsequent compilation of these transcriptions into an XML-encoded textual corpus of Igbo dialects. The methodology described in this paper can serve as a blueprint that can be adopted for other under-resourced languages that have predominantly oral cultures.

Download Full-text

Foreword to the Special Issue on Uralic Languages

Northern European Journal of Language Technology ◽

10.3384/nejlt.2000-1533.1641 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 4 ◽

pp. 1-9

Author(s):

Tommi A Pirinen ◽

Trond Trosterud ◽

Francis M. Tyers ◽

Veronika Vincze ◽

Eszter Simon ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Technology Management ◽

Point Of View ◽

Current Work ◽

Special Issue ◽

Short Introduction ◽

Future Directions ◽

Systematic Overview ◽

Language Technology ◽

History Of

In this introduction we have tried to present concisely the history of language technology for Uralic languages up until today, and a bit of a desiderata from the point of view of why we organised this special issue. It is of course not possible to cover everything that has happened in a short introduction like this. We have attempted to cover the beginnings of the (Uralic) language-technology scene in 1980’s as far as it’s relevant to much of the current work, including the ones presented in this issue. We also go through the Uralic area by the main languages to survey on existing resources, to also form a systematic overview of what is missing. Finally we talk about some possible future directions on the pan-Uralic level of language technology management.

Download Full-text