-Human language technology (HLT) has been identified as a priority area by the South African government. However, despite efforts by government and the research and development (R&D) community, South Africa has not yet been able to maximise the opportunities of HLT and create a thriving HLT industry. One of the key challenges is the fact that there is insufficient codified knowledge about the current South African HLT components, their attributes and existing relationships. Hence a technology audit was conducted for the South African HLT landscape, to create a systematic and detailed inventory of the status of the HLT components across the eleven official languages. Based on the Basic Language Resource Kit (BLaRK) framework (Krauwer, 1998), we used various data collection methods (such as focus groups, questionnaires and personal consultations with HLT experts) to gather detailed information. The South African HLT landscape is analysed using a number of complementary approaches and based on the interpretations of the results, recommendations are made on how to accelerate HLT development in South Africa, as well as on how to conduct similar audits in other countries and contexts.
Research using voice-based services as a technology platform for providing information access and services within developing world regions has shown much promise. The results for design and deployment of such voice-based services have varied depending on the application domain, user community and context. In this paper we describe our work on developing a voice-based service for obtaining feedback from school children, a previously unexplored user community. Through a user study, focus group discussions and observations of learners' interaction with multiple design prototype versions, we investigated several factors around input modality preference, language preference, performance and overall user experience. Whilst no significant differences were observed for performance across the prototypes, there were strong preferences for speech (input modality) and English (language). Focus group discussions revealed rich information on learner's perceptions around trust, confidentiality and general system usage. We highlight several design changes made and provide further recommendations on designing for this user community.
South Africa (SA) is one of the few countries in the world that boasts a large number of official languages. Due to the efforts of government and the local research and development (R&D) community (comprising universities, science councils and a few private sector companies) all the official languages are -to varying degrees -enabled with regard to human language technology (HLT). We present in this paper the current status of HLTs for a few selected official South African languages, namely isiZulu, Sepedi, Tshivenda and, Xitsonga based on a national HLT audit covering all official languages of South Africa. We discuss the HLT position of the above languages in relation to other official South African languages, and also explore the types of data collections, technology modules and applications currently available in the R&D community for these four languages.
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