Tigrinya Digital Initiatives

#

SeReT Foundation Language Team together with :

  1. USLA Institute for Digital Research & Education,
  2. USLA African Studies Center and
  3. Stanford Language Center’s African and Middle Eastern Program

presented a virtual Tigrinya Language Digital Initiatives Symposium.

These 4 days symposium hosted 21 scholars and engineers who are actively working on the digital space for Tigrinya Language. The Symposium was intended to enable Tigrinya speakers to be creators and beneficiaries of Language and Linguistics Technologies to empower and transform their communities through education, research, and development in their own language. The 2022 symposium is the first of many steps to help discover talents, identify relevant projects, and inspire collaboration among the experts towards a more significant, inclusive, equitable, and impactful undertaking to enable technological creativity and cooperation for the greater good of the Tigrinya speaking communities.

Day 1

  1. Keynote: Courage, Excellence, Equity, and Joy: Dr. Aida Habtezion, M.D., MSc, FRCPC, AGAF. Chief Medical Officer and Head of Worldwide Medical & Safety at Pfizer
  2. Tigrinya in Google Translate - Experience and Lesson Learned : Dr. Biniam Gebremichael, Language team lead at SeReT Foundation
  3. Tigrinya Language Digitization - Past, Present, and Future : Yemane Russom, Founder at Geezsoft and Phonetic Systems
  4. An Exploration of Data Augmentation Techniques for Improving English to Tigrinya Translation : Lidia Tesfahiwet Kidane, PhD candidate at Umeå University with Sachin Kumar and Yulia Tsvetkov

Day 2

  1. Tigrinya NLP research at Mainefhi College of Engineering and Technology : Challenges and Opportunities : Dr. Yemane Keleta, Head of Department at Mainefhi College of Engineering and Technology
  2. Design of Portable Tigrigna Reader with OCR and TTS and the new prepared Tigrigna Corpus : Sham Asgedom Keleta, Engineer at ENF, with Amanuel Teweldebrhan Yehaish
  3. Tigrinya OCR: A solution for enriching our digital literature : Aaron Afewerki, Engineer at MaiNefhi College of Engineering and Technology, with Abiel Tesfamichael, Danait Weldu, Robel Estifanos, and Tesfana Tekeste
  4. Geez Optical Character Recognition (OCR) : Tesfalem Belay, Manager at TES IT Solutions, with Ebtisam Hussien
  5. Graph-Theoretic Concepts and the Fidel Writing System : Dr. Ghidewon Abay Asmerom, Associate Professor at the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, Virginia Commonwealth University

Day 3

  1. Joint CTC With Attention Based End-to-End Speaker Independent ASR For Tigrinya Language : Bereket Desbele Ghebregiorgis, Engineer at Mai Nefhi college of Engineering and Technology, with Yonatan Yosef, Mebrahtu Fisshaye, Mussie Kaleab, Ahmed Idris, Rutta Fissehatsion and Daniel Tesfai
  2. Voice to Text Recognition For Tigrinya : Filmon Hagos Gebreyesus, PhD Candidate at Middle Tennessee State University
  3. Building a Speech and Text Corpus for Tigrinya : Bereket Weldemichael Gebreyonas, Engineer at ENF, with Lamek Russom and Simon Mahari
  4. Spelling Checker for Tigrinya : Simon Mebrahtu, Developer Language Team at SeReT Foundation, with Biniam Gebremichael and Ermias Zerazion.
  5. Building Tigrinya Thesaurus and Bible study resource using Strong"s Concordance : Ermias Zerazion, Developer Language Team at SeReT Foundation, with Abel Zerazion

Day 4

  1. Tigrinya and the Arts: Ariam Woldeab, Author, Movie Producer, Director, and Storyteller
  2. Crowdsourcing Eritrean Language-Packs : Kokob Weldetensae, Engineer at Meadi Translation, with Filimon Hagos, Stella Mehari, Philipos Hailemichael, Adonai Solomon and Abraham Negash
  3. Large Pre-trained Language Models for Tigrinya : Fitsum Gaim, PhD Candidate at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
  4. Information Retrieval for Amharic and Tigrinya Languages : Dr. Biniam Gebremichael, Language Team Lead at SeReT Foundation

for more - go to the symposium website at tigrinyadigitalinitiatives.org