Celtic Knot Conference 2019/Submissions/Wikimedia, Mozilla and Common Voice

Submission no.

Title of the submission

Wikimedia, Mozilla and Common Voice

Type of submission (Lightning talk, panel, tutorial/workshop, Presentation)

Presentation

Author of the submission

Rhoslyn & Delyth Prys

Language of presentation

English

E-mail address

Username

d.prysbangor.ac.uk

Country of origin

Wales

Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.)

Personal homepage or blog

Abstract (up to 300 words to describe your proposal)

Wikimedia and Mozilla share common values and vision for an open, inclusive and global on-line community, where everyone can share knowledge without barriers or prejudice. This sets them apart from other global companies that are driven by profit and commercial considerations, and both have contributed, through their inclusivity, to the well-being of small and minoritized language communities. The opportunity and visibility Wikipedia gives to all languages to be able to publish and disseminate knowledge is unparalleled at a global level. This data has often been reused in innovative ways, for example to collect corpora to develop other language tools. Mozilla in the meantime has established project Common Voice to collect a huge data set of speech recordings of from many languages, to enable the development of speech recognition technology. Mozilla uses Common Voice first of all in its own Deep Speech speech recognition development work, but also releases all the data on a permissive open licence so that others can also take advantage of it. This means that academic institutions, start-ups, large companies, hackers, and anyone else can download the speech files and use them to create their own products. Now Mozilla are hoping to gather an additional 10,000 sentences for use as recording prompts, in as many languages as possible. In many languages it is difficult to get hold of sufficient good quality data free of copyright restrictions. Now, working with Wikipedia enables Mozilla to obtain sentences from Wikipedia articles for inclusion in Common Voice without contravening its CC BY-SA licence. This collaboration will benefit many language communities world-wide, and using our own experience of working with Welsh, we will show how people can participate in various aspects of this project to the benefit of their own language community.

What will attendees take away from this session?

Attendees will be inspired to contribute to the Common Voice project if it already exists in their language, and if not will be motivated to request their language's inclusion. Attendees will also learn the importance of Wikimedia and Mozilla's vision for an inclusive global on-line community and the joys of cooperation.

Theme of session

Will you attend Celtic Knot if your submission is not accepted?

Yes

Slides or further information (optional)

Special requests

Is this Submission a Draft or Final? Final

Interested attendees

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