Seminar. First steps towards Quechua’s processing. (2012/11/15)

Hugo and Richard visiting Aholab in Bilbao.

Speakers: Hugo Quispe and Richard Castro (Universidad UNSAAC of Cusco, Peru),
………………Olatz Arregi, Xabier Artola eta Kepa Sarasola (Ixa Group)
Title: Primera aproximación al procesamiento automático del Quechua
………(First steps towards Quechua’s processing.)
Date: November 15, 2012, Thursday
Time: 16:00–17:00
Where: Computer Science Faculty, Room 3.2

Abstract

El Quechua (Runa Simi) como lengua oriunda de la cultura Inca en el Perú, es una familia de lenguas en Latinoamérica. La situación actual de la lengua, por factores como la occidentalización entre otros, ha hecho que el quechua sea una lengua vulnerable, en vías de extinción.

Un grupo de profesores e investigadores del grupo IXA de la UPV/EHU, en conjunto con la UNSAAC en Cusco, Perú, estamos realizando un trabajo para sentar las bases de lo que pretende ser el centro de ingeniería lingüística
de Cusco. Se trata de desarrollar los primeros recursos básicos y herramientas para al procesamiento automático del quechua. Los temas en los que estamos trabajando son: recopilación de un corpus textual, una base de datos léxica para la lengua quechua (BDLQ) y futuras herramientas derivadas de la misma, uso de la herramienta FOMA en el análisis morfológico y creación de un TTS como herramientas básicas para el tratamiento de la lengua.

De esta manera, se ha consolidado las bases de apoyo y trabajo en equipo entre las dos universidades, en bien de una lengua en situación crítica.

Hugo and Richard visiting Ixa Group in Donostia.

Quechua (Runa Simi) is a native South American language family and dialect cluster spoken primarily in the Andes of South America. It is the most widely spoken language family of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, with a total of probably some 8 to 10 million speaker. Like Basque Quechua remains alive but in last centuries suffered continuous regression. The region in which Quechua is spoken is becaming smaller and smaller. Similar with what happened with Basque, Quechua was not an official language, it has been out of educational systems, out of media, and out of industrial environments. Today Quechua holds co-official language status in Peru and Bolivia, even it is not regulated. But, although there have been several changes in the last years, Quechua is still associated with lack of education, stigmatized as uneducated, rural, or holding low economic and power resources, as it was Basque some years ago. Language technology may help to the Quechua speakers’ community and to scholars to built a standard. So opening a door to face Quechua’s future in the digital world. Corpus tools, lexical data-bases and spelling checkers have proven to be useful tools in that way for other languages such as Basque.
The group created by Prof. Juan Cruz in UNSAAC University in Cusco (Peru) has been collaborating with Ixa Group and Aholab since the beginning of 2012. Hugo Quispe and Richard Castro will present in this seminar the work they are doing on the definition of a lexical data-base and a TTS system (Text to Speech) for Quechua.