Students and staff

Digital week

On 27 April at 14:00, Inguna Skadiņa, Dr. sc. comp., a leading researcher at the University of Latvia, and Andrejs Vasiļjevs, chairman of the board of the Latvian language technology and localisation company "Tilde", represented the Language Technology Initiative in the series of talks organised by the Ministry of Education and Science (and other cooperation partners) about high-level digital skills development projects in Latvian universities.

Representatives of the Language Technology Initiative explained that research will be carried out within the project, and study modules will be developed so that artificial intelligence can understand the Latvian language well – not only the written, but also spoken language! Soon there will be a unique opportunity to participate in the "Balsu talka" project, in which every resident of Latvia will have the opportunity to record short voice snippets in Latvian, so that everyone can help create a better speech recogniser that can turn any spoken text into a written text. Its success depends on the willingness of people to participate in the project.

"So that a computer can translate just as well as humans!" says Andrejs Vasiļjevs.

As part of the initiative, it is planned to create and collect different types of data, such as formal and informal language data. The Latvian language does not consist only of literary language, but also of the colloquial language, therefore, as Andrejs Vasiļjevs emphasises, it is necessary to take into account the diversity of the language. In addition, he says that he does not want to stop at Latvian language, because there are many "small" languages, the research of which also requires advanced language technologies.

The Latvian Information and Communication Technology Association organised the European Digital Week in Latvia from 24 to 28 April 2023, in cooperation with the partners of the Latvian Digital Skills Partnership. The Digital Week in Latvia is organised as part of the European Union's Year of Skills and "ALL Digital Weeks 2023". This year it was held in Latvia for the 14th time!

The Digital Week is a national, annual awareness and motivational education campaign to encourage the public and entrepreneurs to learn new digital skills. The week also aims to give special attention to motivating the choice of ICT careers and jobs related to digital technologies.

 

The Language Technology Initiative is financed by the European Union, as well as the National Development plan. 

 

                                 

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