An American academic who has been awarded a scholarship to spend six months in Connemara has said he plans
to help develop an Irish-language Siri or Alexa style virtual assistant
during his stay.
Prof Kevin Scannell from Saint Louis University in Missouri has been awarded the Fulbright Scholarship by the United States government and will spend the first half of 2020 in the Connemara Gaeltacht area of Carna.
He will work with researchers from NUI Galway’s Acadamh na
hOllscolaíochta Gaeilge to research and develop computer resources for
the Irish language.
Prof Scannell
plans to develop keyboard input methods, spelling and grammar checkers,
online dictionaries and translation and conversational tools, similar to
Siri and Alexa, to make it easier for Irish speakers to use the
language “without having to shift to English”.
Prof Scannell, who
has worked with people around the world to help build the online
presence of their native language, has already developed an Irish spell
checker, grammar checker and thesaurus, as well as dictionaries and
translation engines that support Irish, Scottish and Manx Gaelic. He
also works with Gmail, Twitter and WhatsApp to provide Irish
localisations for software products.
The academic said
he plans to make use of “transfer learning” which allows resources for
one language to be transferred directly to another (less well-resourced)
language. He will focus on building Irish along with other Celtic languages which share similar linguistic structures.
The Fulbright
scholarship was set up in 1946 offering students, scholars and
professionals the chance to study and research in 155 countries around
the world.
The Fulbright
programme includes a grant for Irish language teachers to spend 10
months teaching Irish and taking classes at an American university.
The programme also
offers summer Gaeltacht grants to US citizens who are learning the
Irish language to spend two to six weeks in a Gaeltacht region.
