Unlocking AI for the Languages in Britain and Ireland

Unlocking AI for the Languages in Britain and Ireland aims to improve access to general AI skills training for students and their teachers in the humanities, especially in the key area of the ethical use of language models, and will also scope potential improvements to the available digital resources for the lesser-resourced languages of the UK and develop training resources for emerging language models. This will lower the barriers to entry to AI-based learning, teaching and research in the humanities.

The project is funded by UKRI as part of the Tech Missions Fund.

Recent advances in the effectiveness of computational language models offer the possibility of huge transformations in digitization, translation, message understanding and summarization, topic modelling, sentiment analysis, and many other related areas. However, many students, researchers and teachers in humanities disciplines currently have inadequate access to AI skills training and lack the potential for taking full advantage of these new possibilities. For speakers and learners of Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic the situation is even more difficult, since comprehensive NLP resources for their languages do not yet exist. 

This project team, who created and operate the CLARIN Knowledge Centre for Digital Resources for the Languages in Ireland and Britain, are able to call on a wide network of experts in AI in all of the languages of these countries. As part of the Europe-wide CLARIN digital research infrastructure, the project team are well-situated to connect with and benefit from humanities AI initiatives developing in Europe, such as LLMs4SSH, a CLARIN Knowledge Centre for Large Language Models in Social Sciences and the Humanities.

The project co-proposers are Beatrice Alex, Dawn Knight, WIll Lamb, Paul Rayson and Martin Wynne, with Megan Bushnell and Ignatius Ezeani as researcher co-leads and Mícheál J. Ó Meachair as an international co-lead.