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Description & Objective
The 3rd CCURL Workshop, entitled ‘Sustaining knowledge diversity in the digital age’, will take place on Saturday 12th May 2018 in 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 in creating and sustaining the digital representation of 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.
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, as 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.
The vast majority of this knowledge is poorly represented in digital form (only four out of the 522 indigenous languages of Latin America are represented by Wikipedia projects, for example).
Moreover, as this knowledge is encoded in under-resourced (minority, endangered or minoritised) languages, specific methods and models of resource development are required to circumvent the problems affecting low-resourced languages, such as low investments, data sparsity, fragmentation of efforts, speaker communities’ lack of involvement, to cite just a few.
Specific problems arise as well: low digital literacy, the issue of community ownership and control over content, or the need to include audio and video to accommodate languages that are unwritten or having no orthography standard. |
