Menno van Zaanen

Motivation

Digital language resources are essential for languages to be relevantand accessible in the current digital age. In this light, languages with limited to no digital language resources are at risk of becoming marginalized. This can have many (negative) effects on the speakers of these languages. For example, there will be limited to no support for their language in the digital sphere which affects the status of their language, among others, in economic and educational contexts.

Note that the term low-resource languages does not entail that these languages are low quality or even that they only have a limited number of speakers. Low-resource languages have limited to no digital language resources.

Many of these low-resource languages are found in the Global South. This region, however, is often under-represented at major conferences like LREC. This can be attributed to several factors, such as financial limitations, logistical challenges (e.g., visa issues), or a lack of awareness of these conferences.

At the same time, however, low-resource languages provide interesting opportunities. First, collecting and annotating data collections for such languages can have a major impact for these languages. Second, many current natural language processing tools rely on large amounts of data for training and tuning and large amounts of compute power. Research into development of tools that can work with limited resources (language data and compute power) will boost the development and usability of tools for low-resource languages.

My aim is to encourage research on low-resource languages to ensure that languages for which limited to no digital language resources exist can have a place in the current digital world. At the same time, I hope to increase contributions and visibility of research from the Global South on global fora such as the LREC conference.

Biography

Menno van Zaanen is a professor in Digital Humanities at the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), which is hosted at North-West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa.
Before that, he has worked at Tilburg University, Macquarie University, and the University of Amsterdam. His work focuses on applying language resources and boosting the field of Digital Humanities in South Africa. He has (co)organized a number of conferences and workshops, e.g., Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL) workshops (co-located with, among others, LREC, EACL), Digital Humanities in Southern Africa (DHASA) conference.

https://menno.abstractcow.com/