Roles and responsibilities
I am a full-stack developer for the NRC DT Indigenous Language Technology project. I develop and research language revitalization software and user interfaces. I am interested in technology research and development that supports communities in their goals for language revitalization and reclamation.
Current research and/or projects
- Iroquoian verb conjugation tools – I am the lead developer for WordWeaver and WordWeaver-GUI, tools that communicate with language models of Iroquoian languages and visualize the data. The tool is to be used by learners and teachers.
- Speech Synthesis – I am building a speech synthesis system for Mohawk (Iroquoian) to be able to generate speech for the verb conjugation tools described above.
- Interactive aligned text/audio - I am contributing to a project that allows language communities to publish their own interactive text/audio aligned stories. The system is an end-to-end forced text/audio aligner and a web component for visualizing the output.
Education
B.A. (Hons.) Linguistics & First Nations Languages, University of British Columbia, 2016
Professional activities/interests
- Since 2013 I have been a part of the Gitksan Research Lab at UBC, doing linguistic research with the Gitksan community located along the Skeena river in BC.
- I founded and am the lead developer of an organization called Mother Tongues that develops open source digital lexicography software. Mother Tongues also manages over 30 digital “talking” dictionaries with language-specific approximate search algorithms for Indigenous languages from Canada, the US, Japan & Nepal.
Affiliations
- University of British Columba
- Mother Tongues
Awards
DT Value for Canada Award (2018)
Dean’s Outstanding Leadership Award for Academic Contributions to the Faculty of Arts, UBC (sole recipient, 2016)
Key publications
“Language Revitalization”, A. Pine & M. Turin, 2016, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics
Additional links
Aidan Pine
Application Development Specialist
Digital Technologies
5071 West Saanich Road
Victoria, British Columbia V9E 2E7
Preferred language: English
Other(s): Danish, French
Email: Aidan.Pine@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca
Expertise
Information Technology, Computer science