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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

#81

Post by antics »

diggan wrote: post #45
antics wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you combine that feeling/observation together with what you're working on now, which I'm guessing you'll eventually want to publish/make available somehow? Or maybe I misunderstand what the "it will eventually be of help" part of your first comment.

I myself am very conflicted. I will always do what the elders say but opening things up greatly enhances the chance of survival.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#82

Post by bovermyer »

antics wrote: post #79
bovermyer wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am applying for graduate school (after 20 years in the software industry) with the intent of studying computational linguistics; specifically, for the documentation and support of dying/dead languages. While I am not indigenous, I hope to help alleviate this problem. I'd love to hear about your research!

I did research on entirely unrelated NLP, actually. I worked on search for awhile (I am corecipient of SIGIR best paper ‘17) ad a bit in space- and memory- efficient nlp tasks.

Still, that's cool. Is this the paper in question? https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3077136.3080789

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#83

Post by diggan »

antics wrote: post #81
diggan wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you combine that feeling/observation together with what you're working on now, which I'm guessing you'll eventually want to publish/make available somehow? Or maybe I misunderstand what the "it will eventually be of help" part of your first comment.

I myself am very conflicted. I will always do what the elders say but opening things up greatly enhances the chance of survival.

Yeah, I understand, somewhat of an dilemma. Still, I wish you luck and hope that you manage to find a way that is acceptable to everyone involved.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#84

Post by antics »

diggan wrote: post #46
antics wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

FYI, the Wikipedia article currently states: > The last fully fluent speaker of Kiksht, Gladys Thompson, died in July 2012 Which is from https://web.archive.org/web/20191010153203/http://www.opb.or... Maybe there are some sources talking about fully fluent people still being alive? As currently the article gives the impression they were the last person to "fully" speak it.

I’m aware and I think people do not care much to correct it. The tribe has had consistently bad experiences with outsiders attempting to document this kind of thing and I sense that people are mostly wanting to be left alone at this point. There is some possibility that I would make a different decision, but it’s not for me to decide, it’s for the elders.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#85

Post by cess11 »

numpad0 wrote: post #73
cess11 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really care about the minutiae of the technical implementations, I'm talking from the experience of pushing text into LLM:s locally and remote, and getting translation in some direction or other back. To me it doesn't make sense. It seems like an awful way to store information about a fringe language, but I'm certainly not an expert.

and getting translation in some direction or other back. This seem to make a lot of English speakers upset, that LLM outputs appear translated from perspectives of primarily non-English speakers. But hey, it's n>=2 even at HN now.

I don't know, the translation errors are often pretty weird, like 'hot sauce' being translated to the target equivalent of 'warm sauce'.

Since LLM:s work by probabilistically stringing together sequences of words (or tokens or whatever) I don't expect them to become fully fluent ever, unless natural language degenerates and loses a lot of flexibility and flourish and analogy and so on. Then we might hit some level of expressiveness that they can actually simulate fully.

The current hausse is different but also very similar to the previous age of symbolic AI. Back then they expected computers being able to automate warfare and language and whatnot, but the prime use case turned out to be credit checks.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#86

Post by rexpop »

tomp wrote: post #76

Terrible title. Every engineer is indigenous somewhere .

Indigeneity generally refers to the descendants of people who inhabited a territory prior to colonization or the formation of a country, often those who are disadvantaged as a result, and who continue to inhabit the land. Connection to the land is a fundamental element of indigeneity, as is the specific condition of dispossession by colonization: indigeneity, as it is understood today, emerges in relation to colonial processes.

So, although all distinct ethnicities may originate from specific places and times, indigeneity as a political and social identity is meaningful only in the context of colonial domination and resistance.

Not every engineer is engaged in an ongoing struggle for sovereignty against colonizing powers.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#87

Post by layer8 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #30
amarant wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And many more: https://linguisticmaps.tumblr.com/post/120857875008/morpholo...

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#88

Post by rexpop »

romaaeterna wrote: post #38

"His dream is to revive dying languages..." The content of modern culture is too much for dying or ancient languages, and what you actually get is English/modern thoughtspace expressed in the lexicon of an until-now separate culture. This flood of spam destroys what was unique and interesting about the culture, and "skin-suits" it.

Maybe, unless some form of Sapir-Whorf is true, and the lexica—and grammar, and phonology, etc.—impose an inalielable umwelt, one inaccessible to hegemony.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#89

Post by SavageNoble »

antics wrote: post #84
diggan wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI, the Wikipedia article currently states: > The last fully fluent speaker of Kiksht, Gladys Thompson, died in July 2012 Which is from https://web.archive.org/web/20191010153203/http://www.opb.or... Maybe there are some sources talking about fully fluent people still being alive? As currently the article gives the impression they were the last person to "fully" speak it.

I’m aware and I think people do not care much to correct it. The tribe has had consistently bad experiences with outsiders attempting to document this kind of thing and I sense that people are mostly wanting to be left alone at this point. There is some possibility that I would make a different decision, but it’s not for me to decide, it’s for the elders.

This is the way ;)

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#90

Post by Affric »

macinjosh wrote: post #78
antics wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder why their language is dying. /s

Having a language that only your in group can speak is a good survival strategy
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