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Policy Consideration for Development and Deployment of Local Languages

Computing and Content

Hammam Rizahammam@iptek.net.idAgency for the Assessment and Application of Technology (BPPT)Ministry of Research and Technology, Republic of Indonesia

Regional Conference on Localized ICT Development and Dissemination across Asia 12-16 January 2009, Vientiane, Laos

Concept of Knowledge Societies

FreedomInclusivenessDiversityEmpowerment

Source: UNESCO 2007

State of the World: Digital Divide

Access to ICTs grows steadily, but ‘digital divide’ persists.

Proportion of world population with telephonesubscriptions, PCs and internetconnections, 1990-2004 (Percentage)

Source:The Millennium Development Goals Report 2006

History of Language Survey in Indonesia

Esser (1951) 200 languagesAlisyahbana (1954) ~200 languagesSalzmer (1960) 96 languagesLembaga Bahasa Nasional (1972) 418 languagesGrimes (1988) ~672 languagesSIL (2006) 742 languages

Language Survey – Latest Result

National Language Survey at 2815 Observation Area discovered 442 languages (Peta Bahasa di Indonesia, National Language Center 2008)Project started in 1992-2008Dialectrometri vs Lexicostatistics

Dialectrometri method is used to identify the language, dialect, or sub dialect variations

Lexicostatistics is an approach to comparative linguistics that involves quantitative comparison of lexical cognates.

Based on 400 word list, taking 80% threshold comparing both phonology and lexicon of each languageCollection of speech resource was very limited

Distribution of 13 Major Languages of Indonesia

Speakers (million)

Jawa 75.2

Sunda 27.0

Melayu 20.0

Madura 13.7

Minangkabau 6.5

Batak 5.2

Bugis 4.0

Bali 3.8

Aceh 3.0

Sasak 2.1

Makasar 1.6

Lampung 1.5

Rejang 1.0

713 languages 45.4

Digital Language DivideLanguage Preservation

From the survey of indigenous local languages, we can observe digital language divideLocal computing policy will be developed for major local languagesLess Privileged languages are identified and preserved by means of ICTLanguage resources collection for major local languages (2009-2010)

Chinese, Japanese and Korean are excluded from the analysis

Hebrew, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese, Arabic, Tatar, Farsi, Javanese, Indonesian, Malay, Sundanese, Hindi, Dari, Uzbek, Mongolian, Kazakh, Madurese, Uighur, Kashmiri Pushtu, Balochi, Turkmen, Minangkabau, Bikol, Kyrgyz, Balinese, Punjabi, Sindhi, Acehnese, Sinhala, Kapampangan, Iloko, Bengali & Assamese, Filipino, Waray, Bugisnese, Burmese, Kurdish, Tajiki, Azeri, Tamil, Hiligaynon, Dhivehi, Bhojpuri, Tibetan, Cebuano, Telugu, Saraiki, Lao, Gujarati, Pashto, Kannada, Urdu, Khmer, Hani

Scanning Asian languages on Internet – Discovered 55

LOCAL & CROSS-BORDER LANGUAGES

0%10%20%30%40%50%60%70%80%90%

100%

bn id kh la my mm ph sg th tp vn

South East Asia

% Local Languages % English % Other Cross Boader Languages

Note:Cross-Border Languages in Indonesia:English, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Dutch, Japanese, etc.

Language EmpowermentA Holistic View

language community

gov

OSSdevelopers

IT firms

users

languageportal

mediapress

motherlanguage

for creation

highereducation

local language

search engines

electronic delivery of

public services

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localization of application SW

based on standard

creation of local contents

literacy

��������OCR, TTS, ��

mother language use in higher

education

promotion of NLPOCR, TTS, MTe-dictionary, etc

Standardization and Basic Localization for Bahasa Nusantara

Encoding of scripts, e.g. in UnicodeKeyboard layoutFonts and renderingLocale (e.g. CLDR, ICU)Local language interfaceBasic language resource kit (BLARK)Application localization

Document processor, web browser, email client, etc.

Advanced Applications

Online content access applicationsText to Speech (TTS)Search/information retrieval (IR)

Content generation applicationsOptical Character Recognition system (OCR)Machine Translation (MT) Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)Summarization

Table 2. HTL modules and corresponding written language resources, marked with importance

Table 3. Speech application and corresponding speech modules, marked with importance

Table 4. Speech modules and corresponding spoken language resources, marked with importance

ACEH – 32 local languages

EAST JAVA – 6 local languages

Future Work

We advocate and expect P2P Platform, once proposed in an open-access mode on the Web, to be willingly and freely operated by other researchers, under an agreed collaborative framework to be set up, with minimal method and technical consent on collecting procedures and corpus characteristic profiles, in order to bring building and sharing of raw multilingual speech corpora to a more rapid expansion.Collaborative annotation work could take place as well, again with simple agreed procedures on content and descriptor files formats, and on a public use scheme. Such tools, and their open use, could as well underlie valuable action towards supportive protection of “less privileged languages"

Thank You

Language is the heart of a culture. A lost of a language, is a lost for

humanity.