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Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

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Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#21

Post by ks2048 »

antics wrote: post #15

I am one of these people! I am one of a handful of people who speak my ancestral language, Kiksht. I am lucky to be uniquely well-suited to this work, as I am (as far as I know) the lone person from my tribe whose academic research background is in linguistics, NLP, and ML. (We have, e.g. , linguists, but very few computational linguists.) So far I have not had that much luck getting the models to learn the Kiksht gr…

Awesome. Good luck to you!

I am also working on low-resource languages (in Central America, but not my heritage). I see on Wikipedia [0] it seems it's a case of revival. Are you collecting resources/data or using existing? (I see some links on Wikipedia).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Chinook_language

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#22

Post by antics »

koolba wrote: post #17
antics wrote: post #15

I am one of these people! I am one of a handful of people who speak my ancestral language, Kiksht. I am lucky to be uniquely well-suited to this work, as I am (as far as I know) the lone person from my tribe whose academic research background is in linguistics, NLP, and ML. (We have, e.g. , linguists, but very few computational linguists.) So far I have not had that much luck getting the models to learn the Kiksht gr…

According to Wikipedia there were 69 fluent speakers of Kiksht in 1990, and the last one passed away in 2012. How did you learn the language? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Chinook_language

I learned it from my grandmother and from Gladys's grandkid. Gladys was the last person whose first language was Kiksht, not the last person who speaks it.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#23

Post by antics »

ks2048 wrote: post #21
antics wrote: post #15

I am one of these people! I am one of a handful of people who speak my ancestral language, Kiksht. I am lucky to be uniquely well-suited to this work, as I am (as far as I know) the lone person from my tribe whose academic research background is in linguistics, NLP, and ML. (We have, e.g. , linguists, but very few computational linguists.) So far I have not had that much luck getting the models to learn the Kiksht gr…

Awesome. Good luck to you! I am also working on low-resource languages (in Central America, but not my heritage). I see on Wikipedia [0] it seems it's a case of revival. Are you collecting resources/data or using existing? (I see some links on Wikipedia). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Chinook_language

We are fortunate to have a (comparatively) large amount of written and recorded language artifacts. Kiksht (and Chinookan languages generally) were heavily studied in the early 1900s by linguists like Sapir.

re: revival, the Wikipedia article is a little misleading, Gladys was the last person whose first language was Kiksht, not the last speaker. And, in any event, languages are constantly changing. If we had been left alone in 1804 it would be different now than it was then. We will mold the language to our current context just like any other people.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#24

Post by bitwize »

userbinator wrote: post #7

s/preserve/hallucinate/ The next few decades are going to be really, really weird.

This sounds like a grounded use of LLMs. Presumably they're feeding indigenous-language text into the NN to build a model of how the language works. From this model one may then derive starting points for grammar, morphology, vocabulary, and so on. Like, how would you say "large language model" in Navajo? If fed data on Navajo neologisms, an LLM might come up with some long word that means "the large thing by means of which, one can teach metal to speak" or similar. And the tribal community can take, leave, or modify that suggestion but it's based on patterns that are manifest in the language which AI statistical methods can elicit.

Machine learning techniques are really, really good at finding statistical patterns in data they're trained on. What they're not good at is making inferences on facts they haven't been specifically trained to accommodate.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#25

Post by antics »

amarant wrote: post #18
antics wrote: post #15

I am one of these people! I am one of a handful of people who speak my ancestral language, Kiksht. I am lucky to be uniquely well-suited to this work, as I am (as far as I know) the lone person from my tribe whose academic research background is in linguistics, NLP, and ML. (We have, e.g. , linguists, but very few computational linguists.) So far I have not had that much luck getting the models to learn the Kiksht gr…

Wow kiksht sounds like a pretty cool language! Are there any resources you'd recommend for the language itself? I'm mostly curious about the whole "a verb with prefix structure can be a whole sentence" thing, that sounds like a pretty cool language feature!

So, bad news. Culturally, the Wasq'u consider Kiksht something that is for the community rather than outsiders. So unfortunately I think it will be extremely challenging to find someone to teach you, or resources to teach yourself.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#26

Post by antics »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #19
antics wrote: post #15

I am one of these people! I am one of a handful of people who speak my ancestral language, Kiksht. I am lucky to be uniquely well-suited to this work, as I am (as far as I know) the lone person from my tribe whose academic research background is in linguistics, NLP, and ML. (We have, e.g. , linguists, but very few computational linguists.) So far I have not had that much luck getting the models to learn the Kiksht gr…

Good luck I wish you the best. I think you will almost certainly need to create a LoRA and fine tune an existing model. Is there enough written material available? I think this would be a valuable effort for humanity, as I think the more languages we can model, the more powerful our models will become because they embody different semantic structures with different strengths. (Beyond the obvious benefits of language…

There is more material than you'd normally find, but it is very hard to even fine-tune at that volume, unfortunately. I think we might be able to bootstrap something like that with a shared corpus of related languages, though.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#28

Post by thomasfromcdnjs »

I'm an Australian indigenous and have been slowly working on this problem in my own way for a few years.

https://github.com/australia/mobtranslate.com/

In it's current iteration the homepage is just running dictionaries through OpenAI. (my tribes dictionary fits in a 100k context window)

My old ambitions can be found somewhat here -> https://github.com/australia/mobtranslate-server

That being said, the OpenAI models do a fantastic job at translating sentences so I've put my own model research further to the back. (will try to find some examples)

I can't speak of the true preservation, not many native speakers left, but in my mind that's not even all that important from a personal/cultural perspective.

If the youth who are interested in learning more about their language have a nice interface with 70-80% accurate results and they enjoy doing/learning it then that is a win to me. (and kind of how language evolves anyway) (the noun replacement seems to work great, but grammar is obviously wishy-washy)

(At this point, I just rushed to get my tribes dictionary crawlable so hopefully it will be in a few models next training phases)

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#29

Post by Boldened15 »

tho23i423434 wrote: post #4

I wonder how useful this really is. No doubt, it's excellent for archiving, but that's not the same as "preserving" culture. If it's not alive and kicking it's not a culture IMO. You see this happen even with texts : once things start being written down, the actual knowledge tends to get lost (see India for example). This "AI to help low-resource languages" thing is a big deal in India too, but it just feels like ano…

> once things start being written down, the actual knowledge tends to get lost (see India for example)

Curious, what do you mean by this?

> pretty much no intellectual, either in India or the US, actually cares about the mass-wiping out of Indian languages by English

Well I've never heard of this so lack of awareness would be an obvious cause if it's an issue, are there any orgs raising awareness of it? Also seems surprising to me, Bollywood movies are immensely popular and are all in Hindi. Is there a danger of English overtaking Indian society to the extent where Bollywood movies would mostly be made in English?

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#30

Post by thaumasiotes »

amarant wrote: post #18
antics wrote: post #15

I am one of these people! I am one of a handful of people who speak my ancestral language, Kiksht. I am lucky to be uniquely well-suited to this work, as I am (as far as I know) the lone person from my tribe whose academic research background is in linguistics, NLP, and ML. (We have, e.g. , linguists, but very few computational linguists.) So far I have not had that much luck getting the models to learn the Kiksht gr…

Wow kiksht sounds like a pretty cool language! Are there any resources you'd recommend for the language itself? I'm mostly curious about the whole "a verb with prefix structure can be a whole sentence" thing, that sounds like a pretty cool language feature!

> I'm mostly curious about the whole "a verb with prefix structure can be a whole sentence" thing, that sounds like a pretty cool language feature!

That's a fairly common language feature; such languages are generally called "agglutinating".

Prominent examples of agglutinating languages are the Eskimo languages, Turkic languages, and Finnish.

https://archive.is/QQnB6

There should be no shortage of resources available if you want to learn Turkish or Finnish.

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