Latvian language resources and tools for research, education and technology development
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.
