Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture • Hacker News Board

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#91

Post by krapp » Wed, Feb 12, 2025, 12:14 AM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #77

krapp wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When they don't serve a purpose anymore, they should be replaced by something more functional. If and when that's a voluntary and organic process, sure. The problem is that replacement more often that not comes about through ethnic cleansing and violence. These indigenous languages were perfectly functional to the people who spoke them at the time but they were replaced because they didn't serve the purpose of colon…

Hebrew and Irish are illustrative examples. Hebrew was brought back from the dead for the Jewish refugees populating Israel to have a common language. This solved a genuine practical problem. Teaching Irish to kids who all speak English does not help anyone communicate better. It seems like a nationalist pride project, and those are not my favorite.

Israelis could just as well have chosen English for a common language, or Arabic, or any other living language. Reviving Hebrew was just as much about nationalist pride (or preserving culture if you like) as reviving Irish was for Ireland.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#92

Post by antics » Wed, Feb 12, 2025, 2:35 AM UTC

bovermyer wrote: post #82

antics wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That’s the one!

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#93

Post by romaaeterna » Wed, Feb 12, 2025, 8:46 AM UTC

rexpop wrote: post #88

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.

They certainly do. But languages are also very elastic. If you speak modern German, for example, you'll find that it's very similar to modern American English in thought and expression. But this was not true of late 19th-century German and 19th-century English. There has unfortunately been substantial thought convergence due to mass communication. If all you speak is English, you may also find that the current dialectical forms are all much weaker and samey compared to the older forms.

Anyway, in resurrected ancient languages, this modern samey-ness is a problem. Go read Latin Wikipedia, for example. It's much more like reading modern English authors (though with Latin words and grammar) than it is like reading classical authors.

--

I add a natural language translation (from ChatGPT) of your statement for anyone who doesn't share your lexica:

> "Maybe, unless some version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is correct, and language—along with its grammar, sounds, and other aspects—creates an inescapable worldview that can't be dominated."

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#94

Post by reportgunner » Wed, Feb 12, 2025, 2:23 PM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #71

reportgunner wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never heard of that, can you elaborate ?

I mean, it's what it says on the tin: linguists go into remote areas and take recordings of dying languages to preserve them. They'll sometimes prompt for specific words and sentences, other times just record people speaking naturally. Then they'll also write down the rules of the grammar and the vocabulary (another example of using a medium they may not themselves have).

Well that I understand, but how is the AI involved ? You don't use AI to travel to remote areas or to record voice.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#95

Post by troyvit » Wed, Feb 12, 2025, 3:13 PM UTC

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…

> I will continue working on this because I think it will eventually be of help.

They say language shapes thought. Having an LLM speak such a different language natively seems like it would uncover so much about how these models work, as a side effect of helping preserve Kiksht. What a cool place to be!

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#96

Post by fnordpiglet » Wed, Feb 12, 2025, 8:21 PM UTC

antics wrote: post #26

fnordpiglet wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can always fine tune with the corpus you have and then try in context on top the fine tuning even if it’s insufficient. Then with that - and perhaps augmenting with RAG against the corpus - you might be able to build a context that’s stable enough in the language that you can generate human mediated synthetic corpuses and other reinforcement to enrich the LORA.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#97

Post by rexpop » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 3:19 AM UTC

romaaeterna wrote: post #93

rexpop wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They certainly do. But languages are also very elastic. If you speak modern German, for example, you'll find that it's very similar to modern American English in thought and expression. But this was not true of late 19th-century German and 19th-century English. There has unfortunately been substantial thought convergence due to mass communication. If all you speak is English, you may also find that the current dialec…

ChatGPT has misinterpreted me.

By "inalienable unwelt," I mean it in the sense of "inalienable rights" that cannot be removed by external circumstance.

By "inaccessible to hegemony," I mean an umwelt which cannot be perceived by speakers of the dominant language.