Video: Training language computers like children learn a language

Language technology has made tremendous strides in recent years, greatly enhancing the quality of chatbots, speech assistants, and automatic translation. However, this progress mostly applies to a small number of languages that are well-represented on the internet, such as English or French. Languages for which little digitized data exists, and languages with many complex word forms such as Russian and Turkish, pose a greater challenge for computer models.

Dr Arianna Bisazza is an associate professor in language technology at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Groningen (RUG). She studies why some languages are more difficult for computers to learn than others. In this video, she discusses her research project, drawing inspiration from how a child learns a language to enhance the computer learning process.

With her research, for which she was awarded an €800,000 Vidi grant by the Dutch Research Council NWO in 2023, Arianna Bisazza aims to make language technologies more accessible and improve their quality for a wider range of world languages.