Emergence of Egophoricity

Speakers of the Newar varieties will be able to access the invaluable new data on their languages. This spoken and written record of their languages will allow them to achieve the rights of other minority groups as the Nepali government requires written/transcribed evidence to grant this status and will furthermore contribute to their efforts to develop essential teaching materials that will support the survival of these endangered languages.
The linguistic annotation of written materials in present-day Tibetan varieties will in the same way encourage the local speaker communities in Jiri and South Mustang in particular to create educational resources.
All our corpus annotation tools, training data (the manually corrected deeply annotated corpora) and ground truth (for historical Newar transcriptions) will be made available open access as well. These will form invaluable resources for education and translation professionals, since they can be used to further train and optimise automatic NLP tools thus creating opportunities to digitise and annotate any further Tibetan and Newar materials in future. These tools and data sets are an essential starting point of innovative developments in Natural Language Processing.
Through a website and occasional public lectures and workshops in London and Cambridge (e.g. at the Festival of Ideas), we’ll further disseminate our findings that are relevant for Tibetan and Newar language and cultural associations.

Language Policy Workshop