Kat: Yeah. Computers are super, super good at counting. They’re super, super good at finding and identifying these strings. But they’re not very good at the analysis bit. We don’t want our computer to do the analysis for us. We want to be very aware of the kind of software and the kind of programming that goes into it that give us the results. Because we as humans are fantastically sensitive to language. That’s where the human element comes in. It’s why we don’t just leave it all to the computers to just do as they will with it.
Gretchen: It’s really a lot more of a partnership between the computer showing you some things and the human making meaning out of that.
Kat: Exactly. It’s meant to be a partnership where you play to each other’s strengths. You let the computer do the bit it’s good at, and then you do the bit you’re good at.
Excerpt from Lingthusiasm episode: Corpus linguistics and consent - Interview with Kat Gupta
Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about language and technology, and the history of language
What happens when algorithms begin shaping our slang? 🧠✨ In Algospeak, linguist Adam Aleksic explores how the internet rewires the way we talk — from “brainrot” memes to “unlive.” I laughed, learned, and slightly panicked. #BookReview #Language #Nonfiction
Computers are pretty great, and we use them for different language tasks every day. But teaching computers to understand language is surprisingly difficult! In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’ll learn about programming computers to process human language, which is called computational linguistics, or natural language processing. We’ll look at the types of language tasks computers can and can’t do, how natural language processing works, as well as the different types of biases that exist in machine learning.
For more on computational linguistics and natural language processing, including exercises, see this week’s issue of Mutual Intelligibility.
Chris Harvey is the man behind languagegeek.com, a site that provides keyboards and fonts in more than 100 Indigenous languages. He's made it his passion to provide Indigenous people with access to minority languages, calling it a human rights issue.
Harvey, 47, is the man behind languagegeek.com, a site that provides keyboards and fonts in more than 100 Indigenous languages, including all of the ones in northern Canada, as well as languages in Australia, New Zealand and the U.S.
Harvey, who is from southern Ontario and not Indigenous, said he's had the "language bug" since those formative years and has made it his passion to provide Indigenous people with access to minority languages. He calls it a human rights issue.
"I figure it's only fair. I can get English and Russian and German on my computer, but why can't I get languages across Canada?" he said.
"Smaller languages need every bit of help they can, because the dominant languages of the world are constantly bombarding." (...)
Language Geek has keyboards that reprogram buttons on your keyboard and how they access unicode — the industry standard for text on computers. So by downloading a keyboard with Dene fonts, for example, a regular key on your computer will now have a new typeface, like this nasal e: ę́.
Over the years Harvey has been invited to Indigenous communities to work on computerizing their languages. Around 2006 the Gwich'in Social and Cultural Institute invited him to Fort McPherson, N.W.T., to work on transliterating its dictionary project from print to online.
Working with a language committee of elders and teachers, he said they had to decide right then and there what shape the orthography would take.
"What were the exact shapes of the accent marks? Where should they appear? Does the 'i' have a dot on it or not?" he recalls.
"All these sort of little fiddly things to make sure that the cultural institute and the elders were getting the exact look of the script that they wanted."
Years later he was invited to Inuvik to work on Inuvialuktun, then to Yellowknife for the Dene languages, like Denesuline and Tlicho.
