Indigenous language technologies in Canada: Assessment, challenges, and successes

COLING 2018 · Patrick Littell, Anna Kazantseva, Rol Kuhn, , Aidan Pine, Antti Arppe, Christopher Cox, Marie-Odile Junker ·

In this article, we discuss which text, speech, and image technologies have been developed, and would be feasible to develop, for the approximately 60 Indigenous languages spoken in Canada. In particular, we concentrate on technologies that may be feasible to develop for most or all of these languages, not just those that may be feasible for the few most-resourced of these. We assess past achievements and consider future horizons for Indigenous language transliteration, text prediction, spell-checking, approximate search, machine translation, speech recognition, speaker diarization, speech synthesis, optical character recognition, and computer-aided language learning.