Speaker
Description
Technologies are part of our professional and private life, they affect almost any field of our activities. Technologies also affect language, its use, methods of teaching and methods of researching. However, not all languages are equality represented in a digital world with respect to content and technologies. There is a significant gap between widely used languages, in particular, English, and languages with smaller community of speakers. While Latvian still belongs to less resourced languages, when we speak about language for specific purposes (domains and use cases), this presentation aims to demonstrate how technologies and digital language resources facilitate language use in digital world, support digital humanities in general and language research and language acquisition, in particular.
This presentation will be organized around three dimensions: (1) general overview of the Latvian language technology landscape; (2) language resources and tools for research – traditional uses cases and modern challenges (e.g. fake news, computer-generated texts and inadequate translations); (3) language resources and tools for language teaching – corpora, tools and digital content. Finally, impact of artificial intelligence and the technologies in general and on language use will be discussed, paying special attention to the role of linguist (translator, language teacher) in digital age.
Affiliation of the author(s)
University of Latvia
Biographical note(s) of the author(s)
Inguna Skadiņa is a professor at the Faculty of Computing of University of Latvia (UL). She has been working for over 30 years on language technologies for less resourced languages. Her current research interests include language resources and tools, human-computer interaction and natural language understanding. I.Skadiņa is a national coordinator of CLARIN research infrastructure in Latvia. She is also chief scientific officer of the language technology company Tilde and senior researcher at the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, UL. I. Skadiņa has led and participated in many EU and nationally funded projects related to language technologies. Her current research activities include scientific coordination of large scale national project “Multilingual Artificial Intelligence Based Human Computer Interaction” and participation in two EU funded projects: European Language Equality (ELE) and Stairway to AI. I.Skadiņa is the author of more than 70 research publications. She is a member of several professional organisations, expert of the Latvian Council of Sciences.
