Article by Sara Ruberg: “While the use of A.I. has exploded in the West, much of the rest of the world has been left out of the conversation since most of the technology is trained in English. A.I. experts worry that the language gap could exacerbate technological inequities, and that it could leave many regions and cultures behind.
A delay of access to good technology of even a few years, “can potentially lead to a few decades of economic delay,” said Sang Truong, a Ph.D. candidate at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University on the team that built and tested a Vietnamese language model against others.
The tests his team ran found that A.I. tools across the board could get facts and diction wrong when working with Vietnamese, likely because it is a “low-resource” language by industry standards, which means that there aren’t sufficient data sets and content available online for the A.I. model to learn from.
Low-resource languages are spoken by tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of people around the world, but they yield less digital data because A.I. tech development and online engagement is centered in the United States and China. Other low-resource languages include Hindi, Bengali and Swahili, as well as lesser-known dialects spoken by smaller populations around the world.
An analysis of top websites by W3Techs, a tech survey company, found that English makes up over 60 percent of the internet’s language data. While English is widely spoken globally, native English speakers make up about 5 percent of the population, according to Ethnologue, a research organization that collects language data. Mandarin and Spanish are other examples of languages with a significant online presence and reliable digital data sets.
Academic institutions, grass-roots organizations and volunteer efforts are playing catch-up to build resources for speakers of languages who aren’t as well represented in the digital landscape.
Lelapa AI, based in Johannesburg, is one such company leading efforts on the African continent. The South African-based start-up is developing multilingual A.I. products for people and businesses in Africa…(More)”.