[Tibeto-burman-linguistics] mobile phone autocompletion for minority languages

[Nathan Hill]

Dear Colleagues,

I just wanted to update you on this initiative. With your help, Microsoft
has now released autocompletion mobile phone keyboards for White Hmong,
Hani, Hruso, and Paite. The user generated corpora for Hruso and Paite have
already exceeded the training data in size, in the case of Paite by orders
of magnitude.

So, let me just remind you all that we are still eager to add more
languages with your help. In particular, I would like to see more Kuki-Chin
and Karenic languages added. Also, if you can help promote the existing
keyboards among those languages where they exist (also Tibetan, Dzongka,
Burmese, and Mizo) that would be nice.

very best,
Nathan


On Wed, Jun 19, 2019 at 10:10 PM Nathan Hill <nh36 at soas.ac.uk> wrote:

> Dear Colleagues,
>
> I just thought I would mention that I have been working with a friend and
> colleague at Microsoft on developing autocompletion for minority languages.
> They have an app called 'Swiftkey' that is available in over 300 languages
> and they are always eager to add more.
>
> Personally I think that things like whether mobile phones support a
> language will be one of the key factors in which languages are sustainable
> in the long run.
>
> So, I want to invite any of you out there, if you think the communities
> you work with would be interested in having their language supported, and
> you have some linguistic data (continuous text of a conversation register
> in the orthography that users would want) that you can share with me, I
> would be very happy to work with you and my friend at Microsoft to add the
> language(s) you work on.
>
> best,
> Nathan
>
>
>
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