NICE: Native language Interpretation and Communication Environment

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NICE Native language Interpretation and
Communication Environment

• Jaime Carbonell, Lori Levin, Alon Lavie, Language
  Technologies Institute
• Carnegie Mellon University
• jgc, lsl, alavie_at_cs.cmu.edu

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Machine Translation of Indigenous Languages

• Policy makers have access to information about
  indigenous people.
• Epidemics, crop failures, etc.
• Indigenous people can participate in
• Health care
• Education
• Government
• Internet
• without giving up their languages.

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History of NICE

• Arose from a series of joint workshops of NSF and
  OAS.
• Workshop recommendations
• Create multinational projects using information
  technology to
• provide immediate benefits to governments and
  citizens
• develop critical infrastructure for communication
  and collaborative research
• training researchers and engineers
• advancing science and technology

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Architecture Diagram
SL Input
Run-Time Module
Learning Module
SL Parser
EBMT Engine
Elicitation Process
Learning Process
Transfer Rules
Transfer Engine
TL Generator
User
Unifier Module
TL Output
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EBMT Example
English I would like to meet
her. Mapudungun Ayükefun trawüael fey
engu.
English The tallest man is my
father. Mapudungun Chi doy fütra chi wentru
fey ta inche ñi chaw.
English I would like to meet the
tallest man Mapudungun (new)
Ayükefun trawüael Chi doy fütra chi
wentru Mapudungun (correct) Ayüken ñi
trawüael chi doy fütra wentruengu.
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NICE Partners
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Agreement Between LTI and Institute of Indigenous
Studies (IEI), Universidad De La Frontera, Chile

• Contributions of IEI
• Native language knowledge and linguistic
  expertise in Mapudungun
• Experience in bicultural, bilingual education
• Data collection recording, transcribing,
  translating
• Orthographic normalization of Mapudungun

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Agreement between LTI and Institute of Indigenous
Studies (IEI), Universidad de la Frontera, Chile

• Contributions of LTI
• Develop MT technology for indigenous languages
• Training for data collection and transcription
• Partial support for data collection effort
  pending funding from Chilean Ministry of
  Education
• International coordination, technical and project
  management

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LTI/IEI Agreement

• Continue collaboration on data collection and
  machine translation technology.
• Pursue focused areas of mutual interest, such as
  bilingual education.
• Seek additional funding sources in Chile and the
  US.

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The IEI Team

• Coordinator (leader of a bilingual and
  multicultural education project)
• Eliseo Canulef
• Distinguished native speaker
• Rosendo Huisca
• Linguists (one native speaker, one near-native)
• Juan Hector Painequeo
• Hugo Carrasco
• Typists/Transcribers
• Recording assistants
• Translators
• Native speaker linguistic informants

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MINEDUC/IEIAgreement Highlights

• Based on the LTI/IEI agreement, the Chilean
  Ministry of Education agreed to fund the data
  collection and processing team for the year 2001.
  This agreement will be renewed each year, as
  needed.

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MINEDUC/IEI AgreementObjectives

• To evaluate the NICE/Mapudungun proposal for
  orthography and spelling
• To collect an oral corpus that represent the four
  Mapudungun dialects spoken in Chile. The main
  domain is primary health, traditional and western.

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MINEDUC/IEI AgreementDeliverables

• An oral corpus of 800 hours recorded,
  proportional to the demography of each current
  spoken dialect
• 120 hours transcribed and translated from
  Mapudungun to Spanish
• A refined proposal for writing Mapudungun

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Nice/MapudungunDatabase

• Writing conventions (Grafemario)
• Glossary Mapudungun/Spanish
• Bilingual newspaper, 4 issues
• Ultimas Familias memoirs
• Memorias de Pascual Coña
• Publishable product with new Spanish translation
• 35 hours transcribed speech
• 80 hours recorded speech

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NICE/MapudungunOther Products

• Standardization of orthography Linguists at UFRO
  have evaluated the competing orthographies for
  Mapudungun and written a report detailing their
  recommendations for a standardized orthography
  for NICE.
• Training for spoken language collection In
  January 2001 native speakers of Mapudungun were
  trained in the recording and transcription of
  spoken data.

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Underfunded Activities

• Data collection
• Colombia (unfunded)
• Chile (partially funded)
• Travel
• More contact between CMU and Chile (UFRO) and
  Colombia.
• Training
• Train Mapuche linguists in language technologies
  at CMU.
• Extend training to Colombia
• Refine MT system for Mapudungun and Siona
• Current funding covers research on the MT engine
  and data collection, but not detailed linguistic
  analysis