On December 1st, 2017, at the invitation of ACLR, Prof. San Duanmu from University of Michigan visited BLCU to share his lecture themed Thinking and Technical Exploration on the Framework of Language and Culture Preservation.
Prof. San Duanmu first illustrated the importance of language and culture preservation from three perspectives of the inheritance of history and knowledge, the preservation of social customs and habits and the understanding of common national thinking. Then he clarified the significance of language preservation and protection to human civilization. Meanwhile, he believed that traditional language researches always focus on the majority languages and the materials are fragmentary, lacking definition as well as integrated research theories and technologies for the language. In addition, the traditional research period is relatively long, and the documented corpus amount fails to contribute to the goal of language preservation, especially for the endangered languages. Therefore, Prof. San Duanmu introduced ideas targeting preservation of endangered languages proposed by Abney and Bird (2010, 2011). Drawing on the experience of interpreting the Rosetta Stele, the theory suggests that a parallel corpus of known and unknown languages should be established so that the timespent onmanual annotation can be reduced and the goal of preserving endangered languages in a short time can be achieved by automatically analyzing unknown languages with the help of known languages.
