Ugandan Languages: Vitality, Resources and Capacity Building

We celebrate 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages

To honor the Indigenous languages of Uganda, the Department of African Languages & the Department of Information Systems organize a Language Fair with great speeches and exciting exhibitions. The Language Fair is followed by two days of information about the latest in language technologies accompanied by hands-on workshops in text and speech processing.

The Event is sponsored by SIGUL, a joint Special Interest Group for Under-resourced Languages of the European Language Resources Association (ELRA), and of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA).

Where: Makerere University, 19 – 21 November 2019

Ugandan Language Fair- 19th of November

TIME: 10:00 - 16:00
PLACE: CIT Block B, College of Computing and Information Sciences, Makerere University

The fair welcomes you to attend two stimulating keynote speeches and a poster session with presentations showcasing initiatives in local language development.

10:00 Welcoming Speech by Dr. Gilbert Gumoshabe, Head of the Department of African Languages

10:15 Welcoming Speech by Dr. Peter Nabende, Head of the School of Computing and Information Technology

KEYNOTES

10: 30 - 11:30 (Including 20 minutes of discussion)

Judge Daniel David Ntanda Nsereko

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Ugandan Indigenous Languages: Our Heritage Professor Ntanda Nsereko is a judge at the International Criminal Court at Den Hagues. He has taught law at Makerere University and the University of Botswana. Professor Ntanda Nsereko is an ardent promoter of Luganda and all indigenous Ugandan languages and an author of books and articles on law and Human Rights. He has also translated Sophocles' Antigone into Luganda, and published an English-Luganda dictionary of law terms.

11: 30 - 12:30 (Including 20 minutes of discussion)

Professor Manuel Muranga

The case of Rukiga - A discussion of language development and language standardization.

Professor Muranga, Kabale University, has been active in the promotion of mother tongues since the introduction of Runyakitara at Makerere in 1990. He has taught Runyakitara at the Uganda Christian University.

Professor Muranga will talk about language diversity in Uganda and about Runyakitara.

12:30 - 14:00 REFRESHMENTS

EXHIBITION

TIME: 1:30 - 16:00
PLACE: CIT Block B, College of Computing and Information Sciences, Makerere University

During the presentation session you are invited to visit stands. Here you hear more about the work for the development of Uganda's local languages. You can attend a book launch by Dorika Production and a Software Launch by Polytext AS, a Norwegian software company.

Dorika Publications was founded by the writer Waalabyeki Magoba. It is committed to producing quality Luganda literature to create a permanent yearning for reading in children and adults.

BOOK LAUNCHING EVENT

Polytext is a small Norwegian software company. It produces linguistic tools and resources especially for lesser-resourced languages.

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LAUNCH OF A SPELL CHECKER FOR LUGANDA

DEMA Language Solutions. DEMA is a small company that offers LANGUAGE SOLUTIONS. It is specialized in Translations, Localisation, Transcription and Editing Services.

Workshop - Day 1 - 20th of November

TIME: 10:00 - 16:00

PLACE: CIT Block B, College of Computing and Information Sciences, Makerere University

SPEECH TECHNOLOGY

TIME: 10:00 - 11:00 (including 15 minutes of discussion)

Speaker: Prof. Laurent Besacier:

Speech technologies for low resource languages: an introduction</span>

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Professor Besacier is a Computer Scientist at the University of Grenoble, France, and Co-chair and ISCA liaison representative of the Special Interest Group for Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL) at ELRA (European Language Resources Association).

CORPUS BUILDING

Time: 11:00 - 12:00 (including 15 minutes of discussion)

Speaker: Prof. Dorothee Beermann:

Corpus building for less-resourced languages: the creation of African language resources.

Professor Beermann is a Linguist at the University of Science and Technology, Norway. She is one of the Co-founders of Polytext and a contributor to SIGUL at ELRA (European Language Resources Association). She is a formal linguist with long experience in creating Interlinear Glossed Texts corpora for less-resourced languages.

Prof. Beermann's talk will be accompanied by a hands-on tutorial on the creation of annotated text corpora.

TUTORIALS

REGISTRATION REQUIRED

TIME: 14:00 - 16:00

Tutorial 1 Speech technology (Prof Besacier): on speech data collection and annotation software.

Tutorial 2 Corpus creation (Prof. Beermann)

Tutorial 3 Luganda spell checker (Tormod Haugland, Polytext)

Tormod Haugland is one of the Co-founders and the CEO of Polytext. He has worked with computational linguistics since 2015, in his capacity as technical developer and director for the research project Typecraft, before Co-founding Polytext. He holds an M.Sc. in Abstract Algebra and a B.Sc. in Computer Science.

Workshop - Day 2 - 21st of November

TIME: 10:00 - 11:00 (including 15 minutes of discussion)
PLACE: CIT Block B, College of Computing and Information Sciences, Makerere University

LANGUAGE DOCUMENTATION

Speaker: Prof. Laurent Bescacier

Computational language documentation: an introduction

TUTORIALS

REGISTRATION REQUIRED

TIME: 14:00 - 16:00

Tutorial 1 Speech technology (Prof Besacier): on speech data collection and annotation software.

Tutorial 2 Corpus creation (Prof. Beermann)

Tutorial 3 Luganda spell checker (Tormod Haugland, Polytext)