Title:
Speech generation for indigenous language education
Agreement Value:
$260,425.00
Agreement Date:
Jun 1, 2022 - Jun 1, 2025
Description:
There are approximately 70 Indigenous languages spoken in Canada, from 10 distinct language families. Many of these languages have fewer than 500 fluent speakers, most of them elderly. There is increasing interest among Indigenous communities in learning and speaking their ancestral languages. Teachers are often overwhelmed by the number of students, both in the classroom and online. Supporting these growing cohorts of students comes with challenges when there are few fluent first-language speakers. Teachers want to provide their students with opportunities to hear the language outside of class. While there is no replacement for a speaker of an Indigenous language, there are applications for speech synthesis (text-to-speech) to supplement text-based resources like verb grammars, dictionaries and phrasebooks. As part of a Small Teams Round 3 project, the DT-RC at National Research Council has partnered with three Indigenous educational institutions and the University of Edinburgh to develop state-of-the-art speech synthesis for Indigenous languages in Canada, with a focus on educational applications.
Organization:
National Research Council Canada
Expected Results:
In the short term, anticipated outcomes will be strengthened collaborations across industry, academia, and government to support research excellence. In the medium term, anticipated outcomes will be the development of new and potentially disruptive technologies with collaborators. In the long term, find collaborative solutions to public policy challenges and create stronger innovation systems.
Location:
Ohsweken, Ontario, CA N0A 1M0
Reference Number:
172-2022-2023-Q2-00005
Report Type:
Grants and Contributions
Recipient Business Number:
000000000
Recipient Type:
Not-for-profit organization or charity
Recipient's Legal Name:
Onkwawenna Kentyohkwa
Federal Riding Name:
Brantford--Brant
Federal Riding Number:
35013
Program:
Collaborative Science, Technology and Innovation Program – Ideation Fund
Program Purpose:
The Ideation Fund is intended to encourage, test and validate transformative research ideas generated by teams of NRC scientific personnel and external collaborators with complementary capabilities, acting as a demonstration phase for a continually-evolving suite of research and development (R&D) deliverables at the NRC. The fund supports exploratory research through two mechanisms: the New Beginnings Initiative and the Small Teams Initiative.