Congratulations to Linguistics lecturer Dr Jonathan Dunn, who has received $200,000 for the the SfTI (Science for Technological Innovation) fund for a project titled “Domain adaptation to support Polynesian language technologies”, awarded under the theme of data science and digital technologies / Vision Mātauranga.
Recent work has shown that just 20 languages account for 90% of all online language use. Without the support of language technologies, minority languages will never thrive in digital environments. Technologies such as information retrieval require increasingly large amounts of training data, but there is relatively little data available for Polynesian languages like Māori and Tongan. This project enables the development of language technologies for low-resource Polynesian languages by creating novel domain adaptation methods. Māori, non-Māori and Pacific linguists will contribute to the development of this project that will enable Māori and other Pacific language speakers to use their own language in more situations in a digital space. Domain adaptation is the only approach capable of bridging this gap to bring an inclusive multi-lingual digital environment to Aotearoa New Zealand and contribute to enhancing language experience for Māori and Pacific peoples with such technologies as grammar check, question answering systems, digital assistants and more.
Jonathan has worked closely with Jeanette King (Aotahi) on developing this project.
