Conference on Human Language Technology for Development

The Conference on Human Language Technology for Development (HLTD 2011) was co-organised by the African Network for Localisation, PANL10n, IDRC, and Bibliotheca Alexandrina, in Alexandria, Egypt, 2-5 May 2011.
Website: http://www.cle.org.pk/hltd/ (the url of the original conference website, hltd.org, is now owned by another entity)
The conference had three main aims:
- to promote interaction among researchers and professionals working on language technology, language computing industry, civil society engaged with deployment of language technology to end-users, and policy makers planning the use of HLT in national development projects
- to provide a single platform to engage these stakeholders in a dialogue over a wide range of relevant issues, to show-case state-of-practice in HLT and its use in development, and to identify needs and priorities of the end-users
- to highlight HLTD challenges in the developing regions, especially in Asia and Africa.
Programme
Papers on African languages or of general interest are linked in ther program below. Other papers can be accessed via the program page of the HTLD website or by downloading the entire proceedings from: http://www.cle.org.pk/hltd/pdf/HLTD2011.pdf
Monday May 2, 2011
Excursion trip. Departure from Mediterranean Azur Alexandria at 12:00 pm
Tuesday May 3, 2011
- 9:00 Opening Session
- 9:40 Keynote Speech: The Language Technology Ecosystem, Richard L. Sites, Google
- 10:40 Tea/Coffee
- 11:00 Workshop 1: Leveraging the Web for Building Open Linguistic Data: Crowd-Sourcing Translation
- 12:40 Lunch
- 2:00 Workshop 2: Any language properly supported in CAT tools
- 3:40 Tea/Coffee
- 4:00 Workshop 3: Locale Workshop: Data Foundation for Language Infrastructure
Wednesday May 4, 2011
- 9:00 Keynote Speech: Arabic Langauge Processing and its Applications, Dr. Nabil Ali
- 10:40 Tea/Coffee
11:00 Localization
- 11:00 Collation Weight Design for Myanmar Unicode Texts, Tin Htay Hlaing and Yoshiki Mikami
- 11:20 Localising Microsoft Vista for Yoruba: Experience, Challenges and Future Direction, Tunde Adegbola (alternative site, Yumpu.com)
- 11:40 Assessing Urdu Language Support on the Multilingual Web, Huda Sarfraz, Aniqa Dilawari and Sarmad Hussain
- 12:00 LaoWS: Lao Word Segmentation Based on Conditional Random Fields, Sisouvanh Vanthanavong
- 12:20 Burmese Phrase Segmentation, May Thu Win, Moet Moet Win, Moh Moh Than, Dr.Myint Myit Than and Dr.Khin Aye
- 12:40 Lunch
2:00 Linguistic Resources
- 2:00 Dzongkha Text Corpus, Chungku, Jurmey Rabgay and Pema Choejey
- 2:20 Towards a Sinhala Wordnet, Viraj Welgama, Dulip Lakmal Herath, Chamila Liyanage, Namal Udalamatta, Ruvan Weerasinghe and Tissa Jayawardhane
- 2:40 CorpusCollie - A Web Corpus Mining Tool for Resource-Scarce Languages, Doris Hoogeveen and Guy De Pauw
- 3:00 Part-of-Speech Tagging for Under-Resourced and Morphologically Rich Languages - The Case of Amharic, Martha Yifiru Tachbelie, Solomon Teferra Abate and Laurent Besacier (alternative site, Aflat.org)
- 3:20 Language Resources for Mongolian, Purev Jaimaa and Altangerel Chagnaa
2:00 Speech Applications I
- 2:00 Dzongkha Phonetic Set Description and Pronunciation Rules, Dechen Chhoeden, Uden Sherpa, Dawa Pemo and Pema Chhoejey
- 2:20 Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion for Amharic Text-to-Speech System, Tadesse Anberbir, Tomio Takara, Michael Gasser and Kim Dong Yoon (alternative site, Researchgate.net, free membership required)
- 2:40 The Design of a Text Markup System for Yorùbá Text-to-Speech synthesis Applications, Odetunji Ajadi ODEJOBI (alternative site, Aflat.org)
- 3:00 Comparing Two Developmental Applications of Speech Technology, Aditi Sharma Grover and Etienne Barnard
- 3:20 Phonetically Balanced Bangla Speech Corpus, S.M. Murtoza Habib, Firoj Alam, Rabia Sultana, Shammur Absar Chowdhury and Mumit Khan
- 3:40 Tea/Coffee
- 4:00 Panel Discussion on Issues and Challenges in Local Language Computing: Perspectives from Asia and Africa
Thursday May 5, 2011
9:00 Langauge Applications I
- 9:00 HornMorpho: a system for morphological processing of Amharic, Oromo, and Tigrinya, Michael Gasser (alternative site, Indiana.edu)
- 9:20 Swahili Inflectional Morphology for the Grammatical Framework, Wanjiku Nganga (alternative site, Aflat.org)
- 9:40 Memory based Approach to Kĩkamba Name Entity Recognizer, Benson Nzioka Kituku, Peter W. Wagacha and Guy De Pauw (alternative site, Aflat.org)
- 10:00 Morphological Analysis and Machine Translation for Gĩkũyũ, Kamau Chege, Wanjiku Ng'ang'a, Peter W. Wagacha, Guy De Pauw and Jayne Mutiga (alternative site, UA.ac.be
- 10:20 Understanding Natural Language through the UNL Grammar Workbench, Sameh Alansary, Magdy Nagi and Noha Adly
- 10:40 Tea/Coffee
11:00 Speech Applications II
- 11:00 Evaluation of crowdsourcing transcriptions for African languages, Hadrien Gelas, Solomon Teferra Abate, Laurent Besacier and François Pellegrino (alternative source, Researchgate.net)
- 11:20 Development of an Open source Urdu screen Reader for Visually Impaired People, Madiha Ijaz and Qaiser Durrani
- 11:40 Continuous Sinhala Speech Recognizer, Thilini Nadungodage and Ruvan Weerasinghe
- 12:00 Dzongkha Text-to-Speech Synthesis System - Phase II, Dechen Chhoeden, Chungku , Chai Wutiwiwatchai, Ananlada Chotimongkol, Anocha Rugchatjaroen and Ausdang Thangthai
- 12:20 Bangla Text to Speech using Festival, Firoj Alam, S.M. Murtoza Habib and Mumit Khan
- 12:40 Lunch
2:00 HLT Use
- 2:00 A Corpus Linguistics-based Approach for Estimating Arabic Online Content, Anas Tawileh and Mansour Al Ghamdi
- 2:20 Taxonomy of personalisation for Generating personalised content in Technical Support Forums, Solomon Gizaw and Jim Buckley
- 2:40 Content independent open-source language teaching framework, Randil Pushpananda, Chamila Liyanage, Namal Udalamatta and Ruvan Weerasinghe
- 3:00 English to Sinhala Machine Translation: Towards Better information access for Sri Lankans, Jeevanthi Uthpala Liyanapathirana and Ruvan Weerasinghe
- 3:20 Strategies for Research Capacity Building in Local Language Computing: PAN Localization Project Case Study, Sana Shams and Sarmad Hussain
- 3.40 Information Extraction and Opinion Organization for an e-Legislation Framework for the Philippine Senate, Allan Borra, Charibeth Cheng and Rachel Roxas
- 4:00 Tea/Coffee
- 4.20 Panel Discussion on Wider Adoption of HLT for Development in Asia and Africa: The Way Forward
''License (applicable for all individual paper downloads): This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.''