Background of the NICE Project Lori Levin Jaime Carbonell Alon Lavie Ralf Brown

Low Cost MT for Minor Languages Policy makers can access ideas, viewpoints, and information from the developing world. –Epidemics –Crop failures MT for unforseen translation needs: e.g., humanitarian aid.

History of the Project: How did people from the United States get involved in indigenous languages of Latin America? Honduras, October 1998: Meeting on information technology in multilingual contexts. Attended by David Beale and Ruth Connolly (OAS, CICAD), Ron Cole (University of Colorado), Gary Strong (National Science Foundation, Digital Libraries). Discussed the digital divide and minority languages.

History of the Project: Orlando, Florida, 1999: National Science Foundation meeting of principal investigators in human-computer interaction. Attended by representatives of drug commissions from Latin American countries.

History of the Project Workshop in Manzanillo, Mexico, Attended by funding agencies from Latin American countries, and by some scientists. Discussed digital divide and digital government. Established goals for digital government: –empower people by giving them access to government publications –enable communication between Spanish speaking governments and non-Spanish speaking people –give people access to educational tools OAS committed to these goals, with concern about drugs and alternative agriculture - growing, marketing, etc. Report is available.

History of the Project: How Carnegie Mellon University got involved. Faculty a the Language Technologies Institute (LTI) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) were engaged in research on reducing the development time and cost for machine translation for new languages. Jaime Carbonell (Director of the LTI ) and Gary Strong (who moved from NSF to DARPA), made an agreement to apply language technologies to the goals of the Manzanillo workshop.

History of the Project Meeting in Uruguay, Attended by scientists from the United States, OAS, and funding agencies from Latin American countries –Including Anna Maria Prat, department chair of informatics, CONICYT (Chile’s national science foundation) Discussed some possible MT projects: –conducting surveys of health and crops in indigenous languages. –Electronic kiosks with access to government information.

Current Involvement of OAS OAS is committed to the goals of the Manzanillo workshop. OAS has invited Latin American governments to participate in a project for machine translation of indigenous languages. Colombia responded. –A meeting took place in Bogota in May OAS does not currently provide money for NICE. NICE does not have to adhere strictly to MT projects discussed in Uruguay. –MT projects will be designed in collaboration with indigenous communities.

CMU’s Plans for Establishing Partnerships Identify two or three indigenous communities that want to work with us. Design an MT application that fits in with their plans for community development and education. Identify scientists who want to work with us: linguists, computer scientists, etc. Identify non-U.S. funding sources for the indigenous community and scientists. Identify existing programs like ENLACES.

Partnership with Chile Initial meeting: –May 2000 –Lori Levin, Allen Sears, Rodolfo Vega –Institute for Indigenous Studies, and Institute for Educational Informatics, University of the Frontera, Temuco, Chile

Partnership with Chile Agreement with UFRO: –UFRO provides typing, recording, translation –CMU provides computers, and salaries on a temporary basis

Partnership with Chile Agreement with the Ministry of Education (Mineduc): –For the year 2001 –Mineduc will support the UFRO team. –UFRO will record, transcribe, and translate 120 hours of Mapudungun conversation.