CIDLeS Summer School 2014: Coding for Language Communities

Date and venue

August 11th – 15th | The Summer School will take place in Minde, Portugal.

  Event on Google Plus

About the Summer School

There are currently around 7.000 languages spoken all over the world – but each month a language dies. In general we see a strong tendency to learn and use only the major languages such as English, German, French, etc., especially in electronic communication. This is partly caused by the lack of hardware (e.g. keyboards) and software (for transliteration, text completion, etc.) for under-resourced languages, which constrain the natural usage of people’s own language in many tasks. The Summer School “Coding for Language Communities” is about ongoing research and development to turn that process in exactly the other direction: every successful technology can also be used to teach, revitalize and therefore boost the use of regional languages. This technology should also assist the renewal of local languages and cultures by allowing people to actively teach, learn, extend, and spread their language in their community. Our aim is to give people the ability to use their mother tongue in everyday electronic communication, no matter where they are or what language they speak.

What will we do?

The Summer School “Coding for Language Communites” aims to bring together three groups:

• Speakers of languages that are currently not supported by language technologies and that want to use their language on electronic devices;
• Students of linguistics and language-related disciplines interested in learning about software development;
• Software developers and students of computational sciences that are interested in supporting under-resourced languages by technological means.

During an exciting and exhausting week we will work together to develop new software and tools for under-resourced languages. We will create five interdisciplinary teams to tackle real-world problems in ongoing or new open source projects. Each team will consist of five members, with at least one participant of each of the groups mentioned above. Each team will have an expert as mentor to guide and supervise the progress, in addition to three senior software developers that will be available to support all the teams in the implementation of the solution. At the end of the week there will be prizes for the most creative solutions. Each day we start with a theoretical talk by one of the mentors, which complements the practical experience of developing language technologies as a team within an open source project.

Read more about our mentors >>>

See the programme >>>

This summer school is the first part of a larger event. There will be a second summer school the week after this one about Community-driven Language Documentation.

Organizing team

• Vera Ferreira
• Peter Bouda
• Rita Pedro
• Felix Rau
• Kevin Scannell
• Dorothee Beermann

Important dates

Deadline for applications: May 31st, 2014
Notification of acceptance: June 15th, 2014
Deadline for fee payment: July 15th, 2014

For more information please contact clc2014@cidles.eu.