NTeALan Dictionaries Platforms: An Example Of Collaboration-Based Model

Elvis Mboning, Daniel Baleba, Jean Marc Bassahak, Ornella Wandji, Jules Assoumou


Abstract
Nowadays the scarcity and dispersion of open-source NLP resources and tools in and for African languages make it difficult for researchers to truly fit these languages into current algorithms of artificial intelligence, resulting in the stagnation of these numerous languages, as far as technological progress is concerned. Created in 2017, with the aim of building communities of voluntary contributors around African native and/or national languages, cultures, NLP technologies and artificial intelligence, the NTeALan association has set up a series of web collaborative platforms intended to allow the aforementioned communities to create and manage their own lexicographic and linguistic resources. This paper aims at presenting the first versions of three lexicographic platforms that we developed in and for African languages: the REST/GraphQL API for saving lexicographic resources, the dictionary management platform and the collaborative dictionary platform. We also describe the data representation format used for these resources. After experimenting with a few dictionaries and looking at users feedback, we are convinced that only collaboration-based approaches and platforms can effectively respond to challenges of producing quality resources in and for African native and/or national languages.
Anthology ID:
2020.iwltp-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Language Technology Platforms
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Georg Rehm, Kalina Bontcheva, Khalid Choukri, Jan Hajič, Stelios Piperidis, Andrejs Vasiļjevs
Venue:
IWLTP
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
66–72
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.iwltp-1.11
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Elvis Mboning, Daniel Baleba, Jean Marc Bassahak, Ornella Wandji, and Jules Assoumou. 2020. NTeALan Dictionaries Platforms: An Example Of Collaboration-Based Model. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Language Technology Platforms, pages 66–72, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
NTeALan Dictionaries Platforms: An Example Of Collaboration-Based Model (Mboning et al., IWLTP 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.iwltp-1.11.pdf