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MIT2 software solutions for preparing Creole languages for porting to popular off-the-shelf computer applications demonstrated in Seattle Boston, Massachusetts USA Marilyn Mason, President of Mason Integrated Technologies Ltd (MIT2), demonstrated a research prototype of the company's proprietary orthography conversion software for sparse data languages at both the 3rd International Controlled Language Applications Workshop (CLAW2000) and the Language Technology Joint Conference for Applied Natural Language Processing and the No. American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ANLP-NAACL2000), held in Seattle, WA April 29 to May 4, 2000. The Creole version of this conversion software is being prepared for market as CreoleConvert(tm). Paired with CreoleScan(tm), MIT2's proprietary optical character recognition (OCR) solution, these tools serve as a prototype for an electronic corpus entry and corpus cleansing workflow process for languages having a large incidence of lexical and orthographical variation. These processes constitute an essential "middleware" task for preparing sparse data / minority languages for porting to other language technology tools, such as spell checkers, machine translators, speech-to-text and text-to-speech applications, etc. MIT2 intends to act as a coordinating agent to enable linguists, end user native speakers, language development leaders, and corpora builders to coordinate their activites and to conform to established protocols, formats and conventions for data tagging, so that these precious electronic materials can not only meet the short-term goal of providing for a standardized literature base, but be re-used to serve as the very building blocks for development of future language technology tools for these languages. As orthographic and lexical standardization are the base elements for spell checking, authoring, and translation tools, this technology is now being further developed in-house by MIT2 in order to provide minority languages with consistent and coherent standardization strategies for the optimization of authoring and translation tasks. This novel "middleware" approach to porting languages which have thus far "missed out on most of the benefits of the Electronic Age" stirred considerable interest among representatives of some of the biggest players in NLP and MT systems development, who were also in attendance at CLAW2000 and ANLP-NAACL2000. These processes will be further described and demonstrated at the 2nd international Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC2000) and the LREC2000 Workshop on "Developing language resources for minority languages: re-useability and strategic priorities" to take place 29 May - 2 June 2000 in Athens, Greece. Ms. Mason will deliver the papers "Issues from corpus analysis that have influenced the on-going development of various Haitian Creole text- and speech-based NLP systems" and "The State of the Art of French Creole Language Resource Engineering". Located in Boston, Massachusetts (USA), MIT2 fosters research and development activity on behalf of French-, Portuguese-, and English-related Creoles, as well as other minority and vernacular languages, and is actively seeking corporate investment capital and corporate strategic partnering relationships. |
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For more information, please contact: MIT2 Web Page: http://hometown.aol.com/mit2usa/Index2.html |
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Koutwazi / Courtesy of The Creole Clearinghouse |
