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Resources

In this section useful information are gathered about projects, initiatives and news, broadly connected with making any language a digital one.

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Centers and Initiatives Conferences, Meetings and Events Projects Readings

Centers and Initiatives

  • PARADISEC: a digital archive of material from endangered cultures, currently representing over 1,000 languages. We digitise and archive records of the many small languages of the world. PARADISEC not only offers archiving facilities, but is also committed to providing training in data management, curation and preservation, ensuring access to the interested communities and being conformant to the international standards for the digital archiving.
  • RNLD (Resource Network for Linguistic Diversity): advancing the sustainability of the indigenous languages and increasing the participation of indigenous peoples in all aspects of the language documentation and revitalisation.
  • CiDLES (Centro Interdisciplinar de Documentação Linguística e Social / Interdisciplinary Centre for Social and Language documentation): a non-profit institution engaged in the development of language technologies for the scientific and didactic work on lesser-used languages.
  • Welsh National Languages Technology Portal: a collection of free and open Welsh technical resources developed at the Language Technologies Unit, Canolfan Bedwyr, Bangor University, to enable an advanced and comprehensive help for Welsh in any finalized digital product.
  • An Crúbadán - Corpus Building for Minority Languages: an ongoing project for exploiting the vast quantities of text freely available on the Web as a way of bringing the benefits of statistical NLP to languages with small numbers of speakers and/or limited computational resources. Information about all of these languages and downloadable datasets, as well as information on the various tools that have been developed using these corpora, are also available.

Conferences, Meetings and Events

  • CCURL III - 3rd CCURL Workshop 'Sustaining Knowledge Diversity in the Digital Age', May 12, 2018, Miyazaki, Japan, in conjunction with LREC 2018. This workshop aims at gathering together academics, industrial researchers, knowledge experts, digital language resource and technology providers, software developers, but also language activists and community representatives, in order to identify the current capacity for and the difficulties inherent in the process of creating and sustaining the digital representation of the traditional knowledge. The diversity of cultures is a distinctive footprint of the way humans have been coping with the environment over time; unique visions of the world and knowledge are expressed by indigenous languages. The preservation and sharing of the traditional knowledge encoded by languages is being increasingly recognised as a step towards a sustainable and durable interaction of mankind with the environment. However, since language diversity is decreasing, the maintenance and transmission of such knowledge is at risk. Digital language resources can help avoid the disappearance of diverse knowledge systems, ensure their preservation and transmission and foster their cross-fertilisation.
  • Minority Languages and New Media: Towards language revitalisation in Africa and Europe, April 27-28, 2017, Aston University, Birmingham, UK. This seminar is intended to identify and discuss emerging trends in the study of minority languages in new media and technology. This includes the ways in which minority languages are supported through their presence in new media and how minority language users are making use of their languages in digital landscapes traditionally dominated by global languages such as English.
  • Wikimédia France et les langues de France, January 23, 2016, Paris, France. The first workshop organised by Wikimédia France is addressed to speakers of regional languages to train them in Wikipedia contributing and editing.
  • CCURL II - 2nd CCURL Workshop 'Towards and Alliance for Digital Language Diversity', May 23, 2016, Portorož, Slovenia, in conjunction with LREC 2016. The workshop intends to bring together a wide variety of people (academics, industrial researchers, digital language resource and technology providers, researchers and professionals in language learning and digital language planning, software developers and language activists), sharing the aim of building a community devoted to the development of language resources and technologies (LRTs) for under-resourced languages and actively engaged in defining an agenda for an Alliance for Digital Language Diversity.
  • FOSDEM 2016 - Coding for Language Communities devroom, January 31, 2016, Brussels, Belgium.

Projects

  • RESTAURE (RESsources informatisées et Traitement AUtomatique pour les langues REgionales / Computational Resources and Processing for Regional Languages): the overall objective of this project is to provide computational resources and processing tools for three regional languages of France: Alsatian, Occitan and Picard.

Readings