Workshop: "Digital Technologies and Indigenous Languages"
The objective was to explore how digital technologies can play a crucial role in revitalizing minority languages. To this end, talks, workshops, and a training camp designed to develop innovative projects and initiatives were held. Highlights included various talks on Aymara, Quechua, and Mapuzugún, as well as presentations on "Natural Language Processing and Indigenous Languages: An Introduction" by Antonis Anastasopoulos from the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University in the United States; "Education in Indigenous Languages: Faculty of Physical Sciences and Mathematics, University of Chile" by Professor Doris Sáez Hueichapan, from the Subdirectorate of Indigenous Peoples of the FCFM; the talk "International Decade of Indigenous Languages in the context of global and national priorities," given by Alexey Tsykarev, from the University of Colorado at Boulder, United States, and the tutorial on Digital Tools by Professor Alexis Palmer, also from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
At the start of the activities, Professor Claudio Gutiérrez welcomed the attendees, noting: "This event is an opportunity to explore the links between digital technologies and indigenous languages in our country. We know that there are many local efforts and individual initiatives, and we wanted to come together to try to share experiences. The idea is to share knowledge, experiences, and initiatives, to bring together professors and students of linguistics and computer science, who we hope will be motivated to take up these topics for their dissertations, their theses, their careers, and we want this to be cross-fertilized with people who work with different communities in the promotion and revitalization of indigenous languages."
The event was supported by the North American Chapter Association Computational Linguistics (NAACL), the Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data IMFD), the National Center for Artificial Intelligence (CENIA), and NIC Chile.
