CDU researcher internationally recognised for contribution to language technologies

A Charles Darwin University (CDU) professor has been recognised for his work on language technologies with an international award.

CDU’s Northern Institute Professor Steven Bird was announced as the recipient of the Antonio Zampolli Prize in the field of language technology.

Professor Bird received the honour, bestowed on a recognised leader every two years, while attending the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference in Marseille, France.

European Language Resources Association President Professor Antonio Branco recognised the impact of Professor Bird’s contributions to language technology.

Professor Bird was recognised for founding the Open Language Archives Community, leading the development of the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), and establishing the ACL Anthology.

The anthology is an open access repository of 75,000 publications in computational linguistics and language technology dating back to the 1960s.

Professor Bird was also invited to address the 1600 delegates while receiving the award.

“The world’s linguistic diversity – and the threats to this diversity – are too often viewed as problems to be solved by technology,” Professor Bird said.

He shared stories from his fieldwork in Africa, Melanesia, Amazonia, and Australia over the past 30 years with the conference audience.

“From what I have learnt, particularly from first nations people, we do not need to create machines that mimic humans so that we can have human-machine conversations. Instead, we urgently need to support people to work together across cultural divides,” he said.

“We need to enable better communication if we are to deal effectively with existential threats to health, environment and world peace.”

Professor Bird said human-human interaction where technology amplifies people’s capacity to cooperate was what was needed.

With the award, Professor Bird receives €10,000 in prize money which he will put towards his fiction, researching novels which draw on his experiences in remote communities across the world.

For more information about Professor Bird’s research or CDU’s Top End Language Lab