The Unit for Linguistic Data at the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics / Data Science Institute, University of Galway is delighted to welcome Dr John P. McCrae, a lecturer-above-the-bar and the leader of the Unit for Linguistic Data at the Data Science Institute, National University of Ireland Galway. Dr McCrae will introduce the Cardamom project which is related to the development of natural language processing (NLP) tools and resources for minority and historical languages. Register here.

Abstract:

Cardamom is an IRC-funded project related to the development of natural language processing (NLP) tools for minority and historical languages. At its core, the project builds on the comparative principle, which entails you can learn information about a language by looking at either its close sibling languages or, in the case of historical languages, its modern form. For this goal, we are focussing on building the largest collection of known resources on languages in these families by searching the web, social media and retro-digitization. Then we will form new deep learning models which will be applied to minority languages to generate new dictionaries and computer-aided language learning tools, and to historical languages to provide a workbench to analyse historical language data. We will describe progress towards these goals and the recent collaboration with Translators without Borders to develop language resources for the Rohingya refugee crisis.

About the Speaker:

John P. McCrae is a lecturer above-the-bar (assistant professor) at the University of Galway and the leader of the Unit for Linguistic Data. His work concerns a wide range of areas of natural language processing and data science, especially focused on under-resourced languages and lexicography. He has a PhD from the National Institute of Informatics, Japan and was a postdoctoral researcher at Bielefeld University. He is one of the leading developers of the OntoLex model and the coordinator of the Prêt-à-LLOD project.