Gábor Bella, head of the Language Diversity Lab of the KnowDive group, was kindly invited by the University of Bayreuth, Germany, to speak at the conference of the project Africa Multiple: Reconfiguring African Studies. The talk, entitled Diversity-Aware Resources for Under-Resourced Languages, focused on the problem known as the Digital Language Divide. It examined state-of-the-art language technologies, such as deep-learning-based machine translation and cross-lingual transfer, pointing out their limited ability in tackling language diversity, i.e. local specificities in language and culture. It then presented recent research from KnowDive on language resource generation that is able to understand and explicitly represent such phenomena, such as lexical gaps within the Universal Knowledge Core lexical database, cognates, or large- scale wordnets for endangered languages. The slides of the talk are downloadable in the following link:.
