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Team

The AILT working group invites participation from communities, academic scholars, and interested others.

Some of the AILT Team at SAIL, April 2024

Community Partners

Coming soon!

If you would like to get involved, please reach out.

Community Consultation

Our community consultation process was launched at SAIL2024. We countinued the work at CoLang2024. If you'd like to get involved contact us, we'd look forward to the opportunity to consult with you and your community!

AILT Community Conversation Participants from SAIL2024, please contact Amy to access our notes and plans from that session, or if you or your community would like to be listed here! CoLang Friends, please contact Amy if you or your community would like to be listed here!

Participating Academic Programs

The American Indian Language Development Institute M.A. in Native American Languages and Linguistics M.S. in Human Language Technologies

  • AILDI The American Indian Language Development Institute.
  • NAMA M.A. in Native American Languages & Linguistics, University of Arizona.
  • HLT The Human Language Technologies Program (online), University of Arizona.

Core Team

We began this project in Summer 2023 at the University of Arizona, with the idea to bring together expertise in language revitalization and reclamation with that in human language technologies. Our current core group members include:

Amy Fountain

Associate Professor of Practice, Linguistics, University of Arizona. Amy is the convenor of the the AILT Working group. She teaches mostly undergraduate courses, and works to support the goals of the American Indian Language Development Institute. She has been working on a language technology development project with the Coeur d'Alene Language Programs for more than 15 years.

Aresta Tsosie Paddock

Assistant Professor, American Indian Studies and Linguistics, University of Arizona. Aresta (Diné, Navajo Nation) investigates displacement and dispossession of cultural heritage, Navajo language, native gender, Navajo history and philosophy, native nation building, Indigenous urban studies, revitalizating & reclaiming language, tribal government, and Federal Indian law and policy.

Eric Jackson

Assistant Professor of Practice, Linguistics, University of Arizona. Eric is an instructor in the UA Masters in Human Language Technology program. His experience includes many years working together with language community members to develop language-related infrastructure. His goal is to bring the kind of technology tools that have been developed for languages like English, to languages and communities that do not yet have them.

Gus Hahn-Powell

Assistant Professor, Linguistics, University of Arizona. Gus is a core contributor to numerous information extraction and knowledge assembly systems which hybridize linguistic rules and statistical methods. His research interests center around machine reading for scientific discovery and in building systems to scour the literature, analyze findings, and synthesize discoveries to generate novel hypotheses.

John Ivens

Independent Scholar, Software Engineer. John has worked as the technical lead for the Coeur d'Alene Online Language Resource Center for more than 15 years. Formerly, he designed and built software for scientific discovery at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary labs for the Cassini Huygens and OSIRIS-Rex missions.

Melanie McKay Cody

Assistant Professor, Department of Disability & Psychoeducational Studies, University of Arizona. Melanie (Cherokee Nation; Shawnee Tribe; Powhatan; Montauk Tribe) earned her doctoral degree in linguistic and socio-cultural anthropology at the University of Oklahoma. She has studied critically-endangered Indigenous Sign Languages in North America since 1994 and helps different tribes preserve their tribal signs.

Mike Hammond

Professor of Linguistics, University of Arizona. Mike is also affiliated with the Human Language Technology Program, the Cognitive Science Program, the joint Linguistics-Anthropology Ph.D. Program, and the Second Language Acquisition and Teaching program. history research areas include: phonology, morphology, computational linguistics, English phonology and morphology, poetic meter, psycholinguistics, Welsh, and Scottish Gaelic.

Ofelia Zepeda

Regents Professor of Linguistics and Director, American Indian Language Development Institute, University of Arizona. Ofelia (Tohono O'odham) is a Regents' professor of linguistics and affiliate faculty in American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona. She teaches Tohono O'odham language courses and survey courses on American Indian languages. Her research areas include language variation, language policy, and issues of endangered languages.

Rolando Coto Solano

Assistant Professor, Linguistics, Dartmouth University. Rolando works in natural language processing for Indigenous and under-resourced languages, including speech recognition and automated parsing, and language documentation, revitalization and technology including tonal phonetics and phonology, typologies of tonal reduction, and sociophonetics. He has worked with Chibchan, Otomanguean and Polynesian languages.

Graduate Student participants

Alice Kwak

Alice is PhD student in Linguistics at the University of Arizona focusing on Human Language Technology and Language Revitalization. Alice has worked for several years on the Coeur d'Alene Online Language Resource Center, and is developing a morphological parser to support full-text search in that application.

Jennifer Medina

Jennifer is a PhD student Linguistics at the University of Arizona, focusing on Human Language Technology and Language Revitalization. Jennifer has worked for several years on the Coeur d'Alene Online Language Resource Center, and is developing automatic transliteration to support full-text search in that application.


Acknowledgments

The Haury Foundation National Science Foundation University of Arizona Dartmouth University

We are grateful for financial support from the Agnese Helms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice Award through the University of Arizona College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the National Science Foundation Award BCS-2347147. Our project is housed at The University of Arizona and Dartmouth University.