Massively Multilingual Language Technologies

The so-called "digital divide" addressed the challenge of poorer people not having access to the internet and all the myriad resources that come from being digitally connected. With the advent and spread of affordable smart phones, the present challenge is the "linguistic divide" where speakers of rare languages, often in poorer nations or regions, lack access to the vast content of information contained only in major languages. We -- CMU and InterAct -- have long sought solutions, via machine translation and via methods that extend to rare languages with minimal on-line data, well beyond the major languages with economic clout that the major search engines address. The presentation outlines some of the challenges and methods to bridge the linguistic divide.