Apple Siri, Google Voice could help save the world's languages

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Summary: 80% of all web communication is in ten languages, yet 95% of humanity speaks roughly 300 languages. As digital services and devices move to voice control, the commercial opportunity could help close the digital linguistic divide, says the Long Now Foundation.

The majority of the world’s languages have only a few thousand speakers each, therefore, provide no commercial incentives to preserve or to enable on the web.

If you look to the left of the long tail, however, said Dr. Laura Welcher, Director of Operations for the Rosetta Project at the Long Now Foundation, there are about 300 widely spoken languages that do provide motivation for providers of digital services and devices because this group accounts for 95% of all people on earth. (See the yellow colored band in the image).

Credit: Dr. Laura Welcher, Long Now Foundation

In a recent talk given at UC Berkeley’s Language Center, Welcher described her organization’s goal of creating an open public digital collection of all human language as well as an analog backup– the Rosetta Disk– a solid nickel surface with 13,000 microetched pages of language documentation that can last for thousands of years.

Experts say that we lose a language every two weeks and up to 90% of roughly 7,000 languages will go extinct in 100 years. To counter the trend, the Long Now Foundation is leading a herculean effort to preserve thousands of endangered languages around the world.

In her talk, Welcher applauded Google’s plan to sample 300 languages from around the world to help improve its Voice Search product, saying that ideally the data collected would find its way into the public domain such as Language Commons or Rosetta Language Base on Freebase (an open platform owned by Google).

Welcher said that the long tail of roughly 6,500 languages could benefit from development of the 300 (and vice versa) if we build better algorithms that can work with less data. Long tail languages can also be helped through philanthropic efforts.

“As companies make corpora, if it is open then linguists can access it and help build a platform to help endangered languages of the world,” she asserted.

Welcher did not cover Apple’s Siri voice controlled personal assistant technology. But it currently supports three languages (English, French, German) and in 2012 will include most of the top ten used languages on the web, namely Chinese, Japanese and Spanish. As Siri grows in both linguistic diversity and capability, any second-tier languages may take less resources to support, giving Apple the green light to contribute to open resources on human languages.

If there is anything that the Rosetta Project needs to fulfill its objective, it’s help. The current collection contains 100,000 pages of scanned material documenting over 2,500 languages, as well as a growing library of crowd-sourced audio and video recordings. But that’s just a scratch on the surface. There is substantial machine readable corpora for only about 20-30 of the world’s languages. Welcher expects to add only 500 more into the digital domain over the next 10 years unless she can substantially scale the effort.

Programs like the 300 Languages Project and “Record-a-thon” are helping to close the gap, but it will take more to reach her goal of documenting at least 5,000 languages before they disappear. Welcher asked: “How do we get the isocode for all human languages and develop a universal corpus with reliable machine translation?”

Welcher ended her talk with a vision of a free and open encyclopedia of human languages that could model Wikipedia and the encyclopedia of life.

Further reading:

Internet Archive: The Rosetta Project
The DVD-Sized Rosetta Disk Will Preserve Human Language For Eternity
Found in Translation: The blog of the Berkeley Language Center

Related:

A ’stone-like’ optical disc that lasts for millennia
The Long Now Foundation’s 10,000 year clock

Christopher Jablonski is a freelance technology writer.

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Gallery: Emerging Tech that could change your life

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Summary: Here is a gallery of technology that could change your life from some of the most interesting posts on Chris Jablonski’s Emerging Tech blog.

Over the past 20 years just think of all the changes technology has made in your life. For a start, we’ve got phones without cords, books without pages, and cures for deadly diseases. In the Emerging Tech blog we look past the next release of a gadget and into exciting technology that will really impact you, maybe not tomorrow, but in the next decade or two. Here are some of the best recent posts:

Researchers report metallic-like conduction of an electrical charge across the biofilm of specialized bacteria, opening new possibilities for environmentally-sustainable nanomaterials and nano-electronic devices. Click here to read more.

Next: World’s first ‘printed’ airplane takes to the skies »

Christopher Jablonski is a freelance technology writer.

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Bacterial nanowire discovery could revolutionize bioelectronics

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Summary: Researchers report metallic-like conduction of an electrical charge across the biofilm of specialized bacteria, opening new possibilities for environmentally-sustainable nanomaterials and nano-electronic devices.

A team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have discovered conductive properties in the microbial nanowires found in the bacterium Geobacter sulfurreducens that could revolutionize nanotechnology and bioelectronics.

The microbial filaments or nanowires in the bacterium allows electron transport across long distances — thousands of times the bacterium’s length. This property was previously unknown to researchers. The biofilm, as it’s called, can also move electron charges as efficiently as synthetic organic metallic nanostructures.

Geobacter and its nanowire network (Credit: Anna Klimes and Ernie Carbone)

The discovery, reported in the Aug. 7th advance online issue of Nature Nanotechnology, could one day lead to the development of cheaper, nontoxic biosensors and solid state electronics that interface with biological systems.

Mark Tuominen, the lead physicist, says: “This discovery not only puts forward an important new principle in biology but in materials science. We can now investigate a range of new conducting nanomaterials that are living, naturally occurring, nontoxic, easier to produce and less costly than man-made. They may even allow us to use electronics in water and moist environments. It opens exciting opportunities for biological and energy applications that were not possible before.”

In nature, the Geobacter species grows on iron minerals in soils and sediments and use their microbial nanowires to transfer electrons onto iron oxides, allowing them to “breathe”. To better understand the biological process in the lab, the UMass researchers let Geobacter grow on electrodes and through studies found that the metallic-like conductivity in the biofilm could be attributed to a network of nanowires spreading throughout the biofilm.

Similar to the flexibility of artificial nano-wires, the conducting properties of the Geobacter biofilm could be manipulated by simply changing the temperature or regulating gene expression to create a new strain, for example.  By adding a third electrode, the biofilm can act like a biological transistor, able to be switched on or off by applying a voltage.

Another advantage Geobacter offers is its ability to produce materials that are more eco-friendly and less expensive than man-made versions, many of which require rare elements, says the team.

Lead microbiologist Derek Lovley quips, “We’re basically making electronics out of vinegar. It can’t get much cheaper or more ‘green’ than that.”

(Sources: News Release, Geobacter.org)

Christopher Jablonski is a freelance technology writer.

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