Indigenous language technologies in Canada: Assessment, challenges, and successes (C18-1)
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Patrick Littell, Anna Kazantseva, Roland Kuhn, Aidan Pine, Antti Arppe, Christopher Cox, Marie-Odile Junker
| Challenge: | There are approximately 60 Indigenous languages currently spoken in Canada. |
| Approach: | They examine which technologies have been developed and which are feasible to develop for the 60 Indigenous languages spoken in Canada. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technologies are based on the existing technologies and are feasible for most or all of these languages. |
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| Challenge: | Indigenous languages of the American continent are highly diverse, but have received little attention from the technological perspective. |
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| Challenge: | low-resource languages lack the quantity of data needed to train statistical and machine learning tools and models. |
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| Challenge: | Indigenous languages are historically under-served by natural language processing (NLP) but this is changing with the recent scaling of large multilingual models and an increased focus by the NLP community on endangered languages. |
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