The document discusses the current state and future directions of human language technologies (HLT) for Ethiopian languages, outlining the challenges faced including lack of resources and expertise. It emphasizes the importance of developing a national HLT roadmap to coordinate research and reduce costs while promoting integration and sustainability. The conclusion stresses the necessity of HLT to provide access to information in various languages, highlighting the need for collaboration between academia and industry.

1. Human Language Technologies for Ethiopian
Languages: Challenges and Future Directions
Solomon Teferra Abate, Binyam Ephrem,
Enchalew Yifru, Kassa Tilahun, Lemlem Hagos, Mohammed-
hussen Abubeker and Taye Girma
LIG, Université Joseph Fourier (UJF)
ITPhD Program, Addis Ababa University
solomon_teferra_7@yahoo.com
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2. Outline
● Ethiopian Languages
● Human Language Technology (HLT)
– Role in Development
– HLT in the World
● HLT for Ethiopian Languages
– Language and Technology Coverage
– Challenges and limitations
– Future Directions and Strategies
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3. Ethiopian Languages
● There are about 90 languages
● Most belong to the Afro-Asiatic language family
● Amharic, Afan-Oromo and Tigringa are the 3 most spoken
● Amharic is federal working language
– Regions have their own working language
– The language policy states that everyone has the right to in
his/her mother tongue
– More than 20 languages are MOI in primary (I&II) school
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4. Human Language Technology
● Is an interdisciplinary field that encompasses most sub-
disciplines of linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Natural
Language Processing, computer science, Artificial Intelligence,
psychology, philosophy, mathematics and statistics
✔ Morphological analysis/synthesis,
✔ Stemming
Covers ASR,✔
✔ Information Extraction,
areas ✔ MT,
TTS,✔
✔ Text/document categorization
like: OCR,
✔ POS tagging,
Spelling and Grammar checking,
✔
✔
✔ Parsing,
✔ etc.
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5. Human Language Technology - Role
● Enables ICT products to have knowledge of human language
● Increases the acceptance of the technology and the
productivity of its users in the information age
● Helps people collaborate, conduct business, share knowledge
and participate in social and political debates regardless of
language barriers or computer skills
● Relevant for the disadvantaged to have access to information:
✔ the illiterate, ✔ the physically impaired population
✔ the rural poor,
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6. HLT in the World
● Well developed for a few languages of the world like English
● IBM Watson Computer
● Passed its first test winning a QA competition with $1 M value
● The goal of its design is to have intelligent computer that can
interact in a natural language
✔ Understanding any question asked in a natural speech
✔ Answer questions as humans do
● Uses a number of HLT modules such as: ASR, QA, TTS
✗ Requires a lot of expensive servers (about a total of $1 billion)
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7. HLT in the World
● Siri is a simple iphone based system that:
● Receives commands in a natural speech
● Send message
● Schedule meetings
● Place phone calls
● Siri has been claimed to:
● understand what you say
● know what you mean
● speak back in a natural speech
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8. HLT in the World: Europe
● Europe is a continent that is united to one multilingual
economic country with 23 official languages
● To enable the European languages, the European Union:
✔ Invested over €130 M to promote language technologies
and language resource infrastructures in 2009-2011
✔ Allocated €35 M for SME action on Digital Content and
Languages and €50 M for Language Technologies in its
Work Program 2011-2012
✔ Proposed a simple platform that enables availability of any
online content and services in all European languages
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9. HLT in the World: South Africa
● South African government has identified HLT as a priority area
to enable (technologically) its 11 official languages
➢ Various R&D projects and initiatives have been funded by
government through:
● Department of Arts and Culture (DAC),
● Department of Science and Technology (DST), and
● National Research Foundation (NRF)
● The key challenge is fragmentation of R&D activities in HLT
● Addressed by the South African HLT Audit (SAHLTA)
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10. HLT for Ethiopian Languages
● Research on HLT for Ethiopian languages started in the 1990s
✔ There are now a lot of (>200) encouraging and valuable works
on: ➢ Thesaurus contraction,
➢ ASR, ➢ Stemming,
➢ Text classification
➢ MT ➢ Parsing,
➢ Text categorization,
➢ Text-to-speech, ➢ POS tagging,
➢ Morphological analysis,
➢ OCR, ➢ Spell checking,
➢ Information Extraction
✗ Most of them are based on LRs developed for the experiment
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11. HLT for Ethiopian Languages
✗ HLT research covers a limited number of Ethiopian languages
HLT for Ethiopian Languages (Masters theses)
25
NLP
Speech Processing
OCR
20 CSE
Research Areas
15
10
5
0
Amharic Afan Oromo Tigringa Welayta Ge'ez Sidama
Languages
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12. Challenges and Limitations
● Challenges that hinder Ethiopian HLT include:
– lack of language resources: speech and text corpora
– Lack of standardized evaluation corpora and platform
– lack of expertise on both language and technology
– time shortage
● done only for academic achievement in the given time
– absence of national HLT research plan - HLT road-map
● based only on individuals' interest
– lack of sustainable and coordinated research fund
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13. Challenges and Limitations
➔ They have limitations:
– use of insufficient and low quality language resource
➢ research results are not conclusive
– research results are not well evaluated, analyzed and
documented
➢ Their achievements and gaps are vague
– research attempts in HLT are fragmented
➢ lack of integration, consolidation and continuity
● Tokenizer POS Parser LA ASR/MT
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14. Future Directions and Strategies
● Is there any other way to escape the cost of the language barrier
or to cover it with out HLT in the information age? NO!!!
● Are we rich enough to continue spending for only academic
exercises? NO!!!
– 6 months of at least 10 research students doing their thesis on
any one of HLT areas every year and their supervisors
– 3 years of at least 6 PhD research students (admitted every year)
and their research supervisors
– The time of academic researchers doing research for publication
purpose (for academic promotion)
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15. Future Directions and Strategies
● Give emphasis and recognition to R&D activities in HLT
● Develop national HLT road-map (HLT Audit)
– Shows research priorities
– Avoids duplication (even across languages)
– Reduces R&D cost
– Provides a means of evaluation/assessment
– Enforces consolidation, integration and continuity
– Inspires researchers and developers
– Shows the benefit areas for the HLT industry
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16. Future Directions and Strategies
● Establish Institutional/National R&D units
– Fund, coordinate and evaluate R&D projects
– Store, maintain, distribute language resources and R&D
outputs
– Promote the utility of R&D outputs
– Coordinate and support private industries
– Coordinate the cooperation of the academia and the industry
– Promote/attract international investments on HLT industries
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17. Conclusion
● We have 85 living languages
● All have speakers who need information and the right
to get it in a language and the way they understand
– HLT is the way to realize it
● We need to have a strategy to put it in place
– Cooperation across:
● Time: past->present->future ● Language,
● Research area, ● Sector: academic<->industry
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18. We can
make it
BY
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