Learnings from Technological Interventions in a Low Resource Language: A Case-Study on Gondi

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 2832–2838 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 2832 Learnings from Technological Interventions in a Low Resource Language: A Case-Study on Gondi Devansh Mehta 1∗, Sebastin Santy2∗, Ramaravind K. Mothilal2, Brij M.L. Srivastava3, Alok Sharma4, Anurag Shukla5, Vishnu Prasad1, Venkanna U.5, Amit Sharma2, Kalika Bali2 1Voicedeck Technologies, 2Microsoft Research India, 3INRIA France, 4DN Developers, 5IIIT Raipur Abstract The primary obstacle to developing technologies for low-resource languages is the lack of usable data. In this paper, we report the adoption and deployment of 4 technology-driven methods of data collection for Gondi, a low-resource vulnerable language spoken by around 2.3 million tribal people in south and central India. In the process of data collection, we also help in its revival by expanding access to information in Gondi through the creation of linguistic resources that can be used by the community, such as a dictionary, children’s stories, an app with Gondi content from multiple sources and an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) based mass awareness platform. At the end of these interventions, we collected a little less than 12,000 translated words and/or sentences and identified more than 650 community members whose help can be solicited for future translation efforts. The larger goal of the project is collecting enough data in Gondi to build and deploy viable language technologies like machine translation and speech to text systems that can help take the language onto the internet. Keywords: Low-Resource Languages, Deployment, Applications 1. Introduction Around 40% of all the languages in the world face the dan- ger of extinction in the near future. Languages are not only a means of communication but also a carrier of tradition and cultures like verbal art, songs, narratives, rituals etc. When a language spoken in a particular community dies out, future generations lose a vital part of the culture that is necessary to completely understand it. This makes lan- guage a vulnerable aspect of cultural heritage and hence calls for their preservation. When it comes to saving such endangered languages, there are two aspects: Preservation and Revitalization (also referred to as ‘revival linguistics’) (Zuckermann, 2013). The former is concerned with how languages can be archived using different linguistic tech- niques so that it can serve as a lookup for future gener- ations, while the latter focuses on ensuring that the lan- guage is resurrected into the daily fabric of people’s lives. The biggest success story of a language getting revitalized is Hebrew (Fellman, 1973), which went from few native speakers to several million. Initiatives like SOAS’ Endangered Languages Documenta- tion Programme (ELDP) 1 and The Language Conservancy (TLC) project 2 contribute mostly towards the documenta- tion of endangered languages. However, language evolves with culture, and focusing solely on archival efforts misses out on how societies might have evolved differently had their language continued to be in use. In the present day and age of globalization and the integration of technology into …

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