Activities per year
Project Details
Description
Language is the key to accessing the modern technology on which our society relies, such as online search, spelling correction, and automatic translation. However, out of the over 7,000 languages in the world, only a handful have access to such technology. This is in part due to state-of-the-art solutions requiring vast amounts of data, which is unavailable to most languages, which can be referred to as resource-poor. Hence, most languages are marginalized in the current technological development, and will continue to be so unless fundamental changes are made. My project is about addressing this issue, by making use of the fact that languages often have systematic similarities with one another, aiming to increase technological access to billions of speakers of resource-poor languages.
Due to the project's interdisciplinary angle, and its focus on human language, it is uniquely positioned to have a substantial social impact. An example of its importance can be found in the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, which outlines a concrete aim in this direction (9.c.), looking to increase ICT access in least developed countries. However, simply providing ICT access will not have the impact imagined for speakers of resource-poor languages, as physical access to ICT does not equate to access to modern technologies. Real access requires fundamental changes in how we approach these languages. When successful, the findings of the project has the potential to impact the lives of billions of speakers of low-resource languages in third-world regions, but also domestically in terms of, e.g., Faroese. In short, providing people with access to language technologies in their native languages, will lead to increased life quality and equality across both languages and cultures in the world.
Status | Active |
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Effective start/end date | 01/09/2022 → 31/08/2025 |
Funding
- Google: DKK425,000.00
- Carlsbergfondet: DKK5,000,000.00
UN Sustainable Development Goals
In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This project contributes towards the following SDG(s):
Keywords
- Natural Language Processing
- Computational Linguistics
- Machine Learning
- Artificial Intelligence
- Language Models
- Linguistics
- Typology
- NLP
- Language
Fingerprint
Activities
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Secure Integration of Large Language Models
Bjerva, J. (Speaker)
26 Aug 2024Activity: Talks and presentations › Guest lecturers
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A Call for Consistency in Reporting Typological Diversity
Esther Ploeger (Lecturer)
22 Mar 2024Activity: Talks and presentations › Conference presentations
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Multilingual Gradient Word-Order Typology from Universal Dependencies
Esther Ploeger (Lecturer)
19 Mar 2024Activity: Talks and presentations › Conference presentations
Prizes
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EliteForsk- Elite Research Travel Grant 2024
Chen, Y. (Recipient), 26 Feb 2024
Prize: Research, education and innovation prizes
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A Call for Consistency in Reporting Typological Diversity
Poelman, W., Ploeger, E., de Lhoneux, M. & Bjerva, J., 17 Mar 2024, Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP. Association for Computational LinguisticsResearch output: Contribution to book/anthology/report/conference proceeding › Article in proceeding › Research › peer-review
Open Access -
Against All Odds: Overcoming Typology, Script, and Language Confusion in Multilingual Embedding Inversion Attacks
Chen, Y., Biswas, R., Lent, H. C. & Bjerva, J., 21 Aug 2024, (Submitted) 11 p.Research output: Working paper/Preprint › Preprint
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A Principled Framework for Evaluating on Typologically Diverse Languages
Ploeger, E., Poelman, W., Høeg-Petersen, A. H., Schlichtkrull, A., de Lhoneux, M. & Bjerva, J., Jul 2024, (Submitted).Research output: Working paper/Preprint › Preprint