Ugandan Languages: Vitality, Resources and Capacity Building
We celebrate 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages
Where: Makerere University, 19 – 21 November 2019
Contents
Ugandan Language Fair- 19th of November
TIME: 10:00 - 16:00
PLACE:
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
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:
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.
BOOK LAUNCHING EVENT
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LAUNCH OF A SPELL CHECKER FOR LUGANDA
The lectures on the two workshop days are free. The hand-on workshops are limited. We ask you
to sign-up by sending a mail to: .....................
Workshop - Day 1 - 20th of November
TIME: 10:00 - 16:00
PLACE:
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>
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
November 21
TIME: 10:00 - 11:00 (including 15 minutes of discussion)
PLACE:
LANGUAGE DOCUMENTATION
Speaker: Prof. Laurent Bescacier
span style="font-size:120%">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)