Researchers from the University of Alicante (UA) – eastern Spain – are working on a project to take the first steps towards the development of automatic translation systems that include the Mayan languages, with the help of artificial intelligence (AI), and that contribute to the digital preservation and promotion of this ancient linguistic heritage.
The Department of Computer Languages and Systems of the UA has been awarded the prestigious Google Academic Research Award (GARA), endowed with more than 70,000 euros, for this initiative that will pave the way to develop these automatic translation systems that will facilitate the access of Mayan language speakers who do not know Spanish to essential services that would not otherwise be available, such as medical care or legal assistance.
“In Mexico, Belize and, especially, Guatemala, a large part of the indigenous population, which suffers high levels of marginalization and poverty, has one of the thirty Mayan languages as their mother tongue and does not speak Spanish, which prevents them from accessing services. basics and participate fully in the social life of their country,” said expert Víctor M. Sánchez Cartagena, who leads the investigative team, in an interview with EFE.
With this award, the aforementioned department will be able to carry out, in a first phase of its work, the digitization of books written in Mayan languages, for which one of the researchers participating in this initiative and proposed it, the Guatemalan Andrés Lou Ríos , a doctoral student in Computer Science, contacted various publishers and organizations in his country to obtain these texts.
Due to the limited access to technology of the communities that speak Mayan languages, there are hardly any texts written in those languages on the internet, so researchers from the Alicante academic institution are scanning and processing the books donated by Guatemala, including numerous dictionaries, grammars and novels, to convert them into a format that will provide AI algorithms, essential elements for the operation of automatic translation systems.
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Experts seek to preserve ancient Mayan languages with the help of AI
“It is as if we were feeding the AI” to achieve in the future the objective of achieving automatic translation systems from Mayan languages to Spanish and vice versa, said Sánchez Cartagena, who indicated the potential risk that these ancestral languages disappear in the middle term because many of its inhabitants emigrate to other countries or urban areas where the predominant language is Spanish, thus this linguistic heritage is being lost.
The second initial part of the project consists of the translation of texts in Spanish into five different Mayan languages, a task that will be carried out by the indigenous communities of Guatemala thanks to a collaboration agreement that the UA has signed with the Francisco Marroquín Linguistic Project Foundation. .
This entity, as reported by sources from the Spanish academic institution in a statement, works from the field to promote the linguistic, cultural and educational development of the Guatemalan indigenous people.
Sánchez Cartagena explained that these texts translated from Spanish into Mayan languages will then be subjected to AI to check if the translation made by this technology matches the original and is correct.
As this is a long-term project, the Department of Computer Languages and Systems of the UA will publish the already translated texts, which are called evaluation sets, so that other people or organizations can continue researching to achieve the development of automatic translation systems that incorporate the Mayan languages.
With information from EFE.
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