South African human language technologies audit

Abstract

Human language technologies (HLT) can play a vital role in bridging the digital divide and thus the HLT field has been recognised as a priority area by the South African government. The authors present the work on conducting a technology audit on the South African HLT landscape across the country’s eleven official languages. The process and the instruments employed in conducting the audit are described and an overview of the various complementary approaches used in the results’ analysis is provided. The authors find that a number of HLT language resources (LRs) are available in SA but they are of a very basic and exploratory nature. Lessons learnt in conducting a technology audit in a young and multilingual context are also discussed.