The giant leaps in language technology — and who's left behind | Kalika Bali

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 12 April 2021

⏱️ 16 minutes

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Summary

Thousands of languages thrive across the globe, yet modern speech technology -- and all of its benefits -- supports just over a hundred. Computational linguist Kalika Bali dreams of a day when technology acts as a bridge instead of a barrier, working passionately to build new and inclusive systems for the millions who speak low-resource languages. In this perspective-shifting talk, she outlines what happens when a language is omitted from the digital landscape -- and what is gained when communities can keep pace with the future.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh. One way to break down the world's barriers is to help one another understand the different languages across the globe.
0:12.5	Technology is going a long way in this area with natural language processing. In her talk from TEDx Micah in 2020, computational linguistics researcher Kalika Bali
0:22.3	unpacks how machines learn the language of humans and what it could mean for all of us
0:27.7	to deepen understanding.
0:31.6	I'm a linguist by training and a technologist by profession.
0:36.0	I have worked in academia, in startups, in small
0:39.6	companies and multinationals for over two decades, doing research in and building language technology
0:45.5	systems. My dream is to see technology work across the language barrier. As a researcher in
0:52.6	Microsoft Research Labs, India, I work in the field of
0:56.1	natural language technology and speech technology. And I worry about how can we make technology
1:03.1	accessible to people across the board, you know, irrespective of the language that they speak.
1:10.2	So natural language processing, artificial intelligence, speech technology,
1:13.9	these are very big words, they are buzzwords right now.
1:16.4	Everybody is talking about them.
1:18.0	What exactly is NLP or natural language processing?
1:22.0	So in a very simple term, this is the part of computer science engineering
1:26.4	that makes machines process, understand, and generate natural language, which is the language that humans speak.
1:36.0	When you are interacting with a bot trying to book your train tickets or flight tickets, when you're speaking to a voice-based digital assistant in your
1:46.3	phone, it's natural language processing that underpins the entire technology that makes that work.
1:52.8	But how does this work? How does NLP work? In a very, very basic way. It's about data.
2:02.0	So a huge amount of data of how actually humans use language
2:07.8	is then processed by certain algorithms and techniques
	...

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