Aim

SIGUL intends to bring together a number of professionals involved in the development of language resources and technologies for under-resourced languages. Its main objective is to build a community that not only supports linguistic diversity through technology and ICT but also commits to increase the lesser-resourced languages (regional, minority, or endangered) chances to survive the digital world through language and speech technology.

Motivation

Porting a NLP system (for instance a speech recognition system or a syntactic parser) to a lesser-resourced language requires techniques that go far beyond the basic re-training of the models.
Indeed, processing a new language often leads to new challenges (special phonetic and phonological systems, word segmentation problems, fuzzy grammatical structure, unwritten language, etc.). The lack of resources requires, on its side, innovative data collection methodologies (via community sourcing for instance) or models for which information is shared between languages (e.g. multilingual acoustic models) or even approaches that do not need annotated data (e.g. zero-resource or zero-shot methods). In addition, some social and cultural aspects related to the context of the targeted language bring additional problems: languages with many dialects in different regions, code-switching phenomena, massive presence of non-native speakers. It is also important to bridge the gap between language experts, native speakers and technology experts. Finally, digital humanities offer new opportunities to work on ancient languages which are inherently under-resourced. Therefore, the main goal of this SIG will be to increase interaction between researchers interested in all the above topics.

Officers

• Chair and ISCA liaison representative: Sakriani Sakti (NAIST, Nara, Japan)
• Co-chair and ELRA liaison representative: Claudia Soria (CNR-ILC, Pisa, Italy)
• Secretary: Maite Melero (Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain)

Committee

• Gilles Adda, LIMSI-CNRS
• Victoria Arranz, ELRA/ELDA
• Laurent Besacier, LIG-IMAG
• Khalid Choukri, ELRA/ELDA
• Thierry Declerck, DFKI
• Vera Ferreira, CIDLES
• Mikel Forcada, Universitat d'Alacant
• John Judge, ADAPT DCU
• Valérie Mapelli, ELRA/ELDA
• Yohei Murakami, Kyoto University
• Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS
• Sakriani Sakti, NAIST
• Claudia Soria, ILC-CNR

International Advisory Group

• Tunde Adegbola, African Languages Technology Initiative, Nigeria
• Shyam Agrawal, KIIT Group of Colleges, India
• Antti Arppe, University of Alberta, Canada
• Steven Bird,  Charles Darwin University, Australia
• Pushpak Bhattacharyya, IIT Bombay, India
• Chris Cieri, LDC, USA
• Dafydd Gibbon, Bielefeld University, Germany
• Andras Kornai, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary
• Lori Levin, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Satoshi Nakamura, NARA INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, Japan
• Girish Nath Jha, JNU, India
• Guy de Pauw, Textgain, Belgium
• Laurette Pretorius, University of South Africa, South Africa
• Kevin Scannell, Saint Louis University, Missouri, USA
• Francis Tyers, UiT Norgga árktalaš universitehta, Norway

SIGUL Events

• Workshop on Ugandan Languages: Vitality, Resources and Capacity Building, at
  Makerere University, on Nov. 18–22, 2019, as part of the International Year of indigenous Languages 2019
• INTERSPEECH 2017 Special session on Digital Revolution for Under-resourced Languages (DigRev-URL), download the presentation.

Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced Languages (LSTU) workshops

• SLTU 2018 (New Delhi, India)
• SLTU 2016 (Yogyakarta, Indonesia), proceedings
• SLTU 2014 (Saint-Petersburg, Russian), proceedings
• SLTU 2012 (Cape Town, South Africa), proceedings
• SLTU 2010 (Penang, Malaysia), proceedings
• SLTU 2008 (Hanoi, Vietnam), proceedings

Workshops at LREC

• LREC 2022 (Marseille, France) SIGUL 2022 Workshop, proceedings
• LREC 2020 (Event cancelled) "1st Joint SLTU and CCURL Workshop", proceedings
• LREC 2018 (Miyazaki, Japan) "Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages - Sustaining Knowledge Diversity in the Digital Age", proceedings
• LREC 2016 (Portorož, Slovenia) "Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages - Towards an Alliance for Digital Language Diversity", proceedings
• LREC 2014 (Reykjavik, Iceland) "Collaboration and Computing for Under Resourced Languages in the Linked Open Data Era", proceedings
• LREC 2012 (Istanbul, Turkey) "Language technology for normalisation of less-resourced languages", proceedings
• LREC 2010 (Malta) "Creation and use of basic lexical resources for less-resourced languages", proceedings
• LREC 2008 (Marrakech, Morocco) "Collaboration: interoperability between people in the creation of language resources for less-resourced languages", proceedings

LRL Workshops at L&TC (Poznan)

• L&TC 2017 “Language Technology for Less Resourced Languages”
• L&TC 2015 “Language Technologies in Support of Less-Resourced Languages”
• L&TC 2013 “Less Resourced Languages, New Technologies, New Challenges and Opportunities”
• L&TC 2011 “Addressing the Gaps in Language Resources and Technologies”
• L&TC 2009 “Getting Less-Resourced Languages on-Board!”

 Events endorsed by SIGUL

• Zero Resource Speech Challenge 2019 (deadline March 15, 2019).
• Digital Revolution for Under-resourced Languages in Asia, in Nara (Japan), February 19-2, 2019
• Developmental Language Datasets and Tools Match-Up Bootcamp, at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen (The Netherlands) on May 22–24, 2019

Reports on the SIGUL activities are available below:

• 2019-2020 Activity Report (PDF)
• 2017-2018 Activity Report (PDF)