Full professor in ‘Comparative Indo-Europ...

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May 9, 2022 12:40 AM

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From www.iamexpat.nl - May 9, 2022 12:40 AM

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"Full professor in ‘Comparative Indo-European Linguistics’, 1,0 fte (38 hrs per week)
to start no later than January 2023.
The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) hosts a large high-profile research group in the field of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics. The LUCL is looking to appoint a full professor in Comparative Indo-European Linguistics to support and expand the current lines of research of this group and to develop new approaches in research and education.
The successful candidate will:

• Prepare and teach courses in the fields of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics and Historical Linguistics as part of the BA, MA and ResMA Linguistics (languages of instruction: Dutch and English);

• Engage in all usual forms of instruction in these programmes, including supervising internships and BA, MA and ResMA theses;

• Play an active role in recruiting Dutch and international BA, MA and ResMA students, and in the development and implementation of educational innovations;

• Conduct research in the field of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics and present the results in the form of publications, conference presentations and by other means;

• Apply for project funding at the national and international levels (NWO, ERC, Horizon Europe, etc.);

• Attract and supervise PhD candidates and junior researchers;

• Actively support and improve the international collaborations of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics at the LUCL;

• Participate in the academic community of the LUCL, the Faculty of Humanities and the University;

• Act as an ambassador of the field of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics, both locally and internationally;

· Perform administrative and management tasks within LUCL, the Faculty of Humanities and Leiden University.

Requirements:
Applicants for the position must meet as a minimum the following requirements:

The Full Professor has in-depth knowledge of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics and is an inspiring and enthusiastic instructor, who can demonstrate experience in teaching multiple aspects of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics and various Indo-European languages.

The professors research meets the highest academic standards and can make a valuable contribution to the research profile of the LUCL. It reflects the diversity of the field of Indo-European Studies, covering a variety of possible subjects ranging from the philology, synchronic description and/or historical grammar of the individual languages to the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European phonology, morphology, semantics and/or syntax.

The professor is capable of leading the group of teachers and researchers, demonstrating the ability to connect and coach group members, as well as a proactive attitude for LUCL and for the faculty of Humanities. S/he is capable of taking on administrative duties, both in the teaching programme and at the Institute and Faculty levels. S/he is able to act as a generous and selfless manager of Indo-European Studies at the LUCL, with the necessary self-reflection, and to serve its interests nationally and internationally, both within and outside the field.
Salary Benefits:
Terms and conditions
We offer a full-time temporary appointment for initially a period of 18 months, convertible into a permanent position in case of satisfactory performance. If the successful candidate has already held a full professorship or if they have successfully completed a tenure track, they may be eligible for a permanent appointment. The gross monthly salary will be between € 5.864,- and € 8.539,- commensurate with qualifications and experience. These amounts are based on a fulltime appointment and are in conformity with current salary scales (HL-2) under the collective employment agreement (CAO) for Dutch Universities.
An appointment at Leiden University includes pension build-up and other benefits, including an annual holiday premium of 8% and an end-of-year premium of 8.3%. Candidates from outside the Netherlands may be eligible for a substantial tax break. For international spouses we have set up a dual career programme. For more information, see https://workingat.leiden.edu/ More information about the terms of employment can be found at: https://staff.leiden.edu
After appointment, depending on experience and formal qualifications to date, the successful applicant will be required to enter a nationally standardized tertiary teaching skills certification trajectory (BKO or Basis Kwalificatie Onderwijs), successful completion of which is a condition for favorable assessment in work reviews.
Address:
Rapenburg"
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As AI giants duel, the Global South builds its own brainpower - Features

Researchers across Africa, Asia and the Middle East are building their own language models designed for local tongues, cultural nuance and digital independence

"In a high-stakes artificial intelligence race between the United States and China, an equally transformative movement is taking shape elsewhere. From Cape Town to Bangalore, from Cairo to Riyadh, researchers, engineers and public institutions are building homegrown AI systems, models that speak not just in local languages, but with regional insight and cultural depth.

The dominant narrative in AI, particularly since the early 2020s, has focused on a handful of US-based companies like OpenAI with GPT, Google with Gemini, Meta’s LLaMa, Anthropic’s Claude. They vie to build ever larger and more capable models. Earlier in 2025, China’s DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based startup, added a new twist by releasing large language models (LLMs) that rival their American counterparts, with a smaller computational demand. But increasingly, researchers across the Global South are challenging the notion that technological leadership in AI is the exclusive domain of these two superpowers.

Instead, scientists and institutions in countries like India, South Africa, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are rethinking the very premise of generative AI. Their focus is not on scaling up, but on scaling right, building models that work for local users, in their languages, and within their social and economic realities.

“How do we make sure that the entire planet benefits from AI?” asks Benjamin Rosman, a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand and a lead developer of InkubaLM, a generative model trained on five African languages. “I want more and more voices to be in the conversation”.

Beyond English, beyond Silicon Valley

Large language models work by training on massive troves of online text. While the latest versions of GPT, Gemini or LLaMa boast multilingual capabilities, the overwhelming presence of English-language material and Western cultural contexts in these datasets skews their outputs. For speakers of Hindi, Arabic, Swahili, Xhosa and countless other languages, that means AI systems may not only stumble over grammar and syntax, they can also miss the point entirely.

“In Indian languages, large models trained on English data just don’t perform well,” says Janki Nawale, a linguist at AI4Bharat, a lab at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. “There are cultural nuances, dialectal variations, and even non-standard scripts that make translation and understanding difficult.” Nawale’s team builds supervised datasets and evaluation benchmarks for what specialists call “low resource” languages, those that lack robust digital corpora for machine learning.

It’s not just a question of grammar or vocabulary. “The meaning often lies in the implication,” says Vukosi Marivate, a professor of computer science at the University of Pretoria, in South Africa. “In isiXhosa, the words are one thing but what’s being implied is what really matters.” Marivate co-leads Masakhane NLP, a pan-African collective of AI researchers that recently developed AFROBENCH, a rigorous benchmark for evaluating how well large language models perform on 64 African languages across 15 tasks. The results, published in a preprint in March, revealed major gaps in performance between English and nearly all African languages, especially with open-source models.

Similar concerns arise in the Arabic-speaking world. “If English dominates the training process, the answers will be filtered through a Western lens rather than an Arab one,” says Mekki Habib, a robotics professor at the American University in Cairo. A 2024 preprint from the Tunisian AI firm Clusterlab finds that many multilingual models fail to capture Arabic’s syntactic complexity or cultural frames of reference, particularly in dialect-rich contexts.

Governments step in

For many countries in the Global South, the stakes are geopolitical as well as linguistic. Dependence on Western or Chinese AI infrastructure could mean diminished sovereignty over information, technology, and even national narratives. In response, governments are pouring resources into creating their own models.

Saudi Arabia’s national AI authority, SDAIA, has built ‘ALLaM,’ an Arabic-first model based on Meta’s LLaMa-2, enriched with more than 540 billion Arabic tokens. The United Arab Emirates has backed several initiatives, including ‘Jais,’ an open-source Arabic-English model built by MBZUAI in collaboration with US chipmaker Cerebras Systems and the Abu Dhabi firm Inception. Another UAE-backed project, Noor, focuses on educational and Islamic applications.

In Qatar, researchers at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, and the Qatar Computing Research Institute, have developed the Fanar platform and its LLMs Fanar Star and Fanar Prime. Trained on a trillion tokens of Arabic, English, and code, Fanar’s tokenization approach is specifically engineered to reflect Arabic’s rich morphology and syntax.

India has emerged as a major hub for AI localization. In 2024, the government launched BharatGen, a public-private initiative funded with 235 crore (€26 million) initiative aimed at building foundation models attuned to India’s vast linguistic and cultural diversity. The project is led by the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay and also involves its sister organizations in Hyderabad, Mandi, Kanpur, Indore, and Madras. The programme’s first product, e-vikrAI, can generate product descriptions and pricing suggestions from images in various Indic languages. Startups like Ola-backed Krutrim and CoRover’s BharatGPT have jumped in, while Google’s Indian lab unveiled MuRIL, a language model trained exclusively on Indian languages. The Indian governments’ AI Mission has received more than180 proposals from local researchers and startups to build national-scale AI infrastructure and large language models, and the Bengaluru-based company, AI Sarvam, has been selected to build India’s first ‘sovereign’ LLM, expected to be fluent in various Indian languages.

In Africa, much of the energy comes from the ground up. Masakhane NLP and Deep Learning Indaba, a pan-African academic movement, have created a decentralized research culture across the continent. One notable offshoot, Johannesburg-based Lelapa AI, launched InkubaLM in September 2024. It’s a ‘small language model’ (SLM) focused on five African languages with broad reach: Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, isiZulu and isiXhosa.

“With only 0.4 billion parameters, it performs comparably to much larger models,” says Rosman. The model’s compact size and efficiency are designed to meet Africa’s infrastructure constraints while serving real-world applications. Another African model is UlizaLlama, a 7-billion parameter model developed by the Kenyan foundation Jacaranda Health, to support new and expectant mothers with AI-driven support in Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, Xhosa, and Zulu.

India’s research scene is similarly vibrant. The AI4Bharat laboratory at IIT Madras has just released IndicTrans2, that supports translation across all 22 scheduled Indian languages. Sarvam AI, another startup, released its first LLM last year to support 10 major Indian languages. And KissanAI, co-founded by Pratik Desai, develops generative AI tools to deliver agricultural advice to farmers in their native languages.

The data dilemma

Yet building LLMs for underrepresented languages poses enormous challenges. Chief among them is data scarcity. “Even Hindi datasets are tiny compared to English,” says Tapas Kumar Mishra, a professor at the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela in eastern India. “So, training models from scratch is unlikely to match English-based models in performance.”

Rosman agrees. “The big-data paradigm doesn’t work for African languages. We simply don’t have the volume.” His team is pioneering alternative approaches like the Esethu Framework, a protocol for ethically collecting speech datasets from native speakers and redistributing revenue back to further development of AI tools for under-resourced languages. The project’s pilot used read speech from isiXhosa speakers, complete with metadata, to build voice-based applications.

In Arab nations, similar work is underway. Clusterlab’s 101 Billion Arabic Words Dataset is the largest of its kind, meticulously extracted and cleaned from the web to support Arabic-first model training.

The cost of staying local

But for all the innovation, practical obstacles remain. “The return on investment is low,” says KissanAI’s Desai. “The market for regional language models is big, but those with purchasing power still work in English.” And while Western tech companies attract the best minds globally, including many Indian and African scientists, researchers at home often face limited funding, patchy computing infrastructure, and unclear legal frameworks around data and privacy.

“There’s still a lack of sustainable funding, a shortage of specialists, and insufficient integration with educational or public systems,” warns Habib, the Cairo-based professor. “All of this has to change.”

A different vision for AI

Despite the hurdles, what’s emerging is a distinct vision for AI in the Global South – one that favours practical impact over prestige, and community ownership over corporate secrecy.

“There’s more emphasis here on solving real problems for real people,” says Nawale of AI4Bharat. Rather than chasing benchmark scores, researchers are aiming for relevance: tools for farmers, students, and small business owners.

And openness matters. “Some companies claim to be open-source, but they only release the model weights, not the data,” Marivate says. “With InkubaLM, we release both. We want others to build on what we’ve done, to do it better.”

In a global contest often measured in teraflops and tokens, these efforts may seem modest. But for the billions who speak the world’s less-resourced languages, they represent a future in which AI doesn’t just speak to them, but with them."

Sibusiso Biyela, Amr Rageh and Shakoor Rather

20 May 2025

https://www.natureasia.com/en/nmiddleeast/article/10.1038/nmiddleeast.2025.65

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From www.natureasia.com - May 20, 10:49 PM

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Bill Would Allow AI-Assisted Translation in Wis. Courtrooms

"Bill Would Allow AI-Assisted Translation in Wis. Courtrooms

The proposed legislation would permit county courts to use “AI or other machine-assisted translation tools” with or instead of human interpreters in civil or criminal proceedings.

June 11, 2025 • Mitchell Schmidt, The Wisconsin State Journal

(TNS) — Non-English speaking Wisconsinites who find themselves in a county courtroom could receive their state-mandated interpretation services from a computer screen or tablet, rather than from a trained interpreter, under proposed legislation circulating in the state Capitol.

With the cost and demand for courtroom interpreters climbing annually in Wisconsin, the proposal is billed as an opportunity for county courts to capture the cost savings and efficiencies offered by artificial intelligence and machine-learning programs that seek to bridge language gaps. But AI and legal experts said they have serious concerns that the rapidly advancing technology is still years from being able to replace the skill and expertise of a certified court interpreter.

Florencia Russ, CEO of Transcend Translations and a certified translator with the American Translators Association, said the risks for mistranslations or errors in court proceedings — where individuals may be facing a jail sentence or offering crucial testimony — are far too high to incorporate unproven technology into a system built on the right to due process.

"I don’t recommend using AI in place of humans at this point at all," Russ said. "There needs to be a human in the loop anytime AI is used. Even if it translates things correctly, there’s context, there’s nuance, there’s words that have multiple meanings and it’s just not possible yet to have results that are accurate enough to be used in a court setting safely, legally or ethically, in my opinion.”

The proposal, co-authored by Sen. Chris Kapenga, R-Delafield, and Rep. Dave Maxey, R-New Berlin, would allow county courts "to permit the use of AI or other machine-assisted translation tools as an alternative to, or in conjunction with, human interpreters in civil or criminal proceedings, certain municipal proceedings, and administrative contested case proceedings."

The measure also allows an interpreter to provide services via telephone or online link for criminal trials, which currently require in-person interpretation services. Many courts already allow for remote interpretation in other proceedings, such as hearings or civil cases.

"Importantly, counties that prefer to continue using human interpreters would retain the full authority to do so — this bill simply offers a flexible choice," the bill's co-authors wrote in a memo seeking cosponsors. "This legislation is essential for modernizing our court system and reducing the financial burden on counties."

Kapenga said the proposal seeks to capitalize on the rapid evolution taking place in artificial intelligence and see if specific programs geared toward language translation can be incorporated into the state's court system.

"I fully expect this will be a nationwide thing that everybody goes to," Kapenga said, adding that he envisions the bill to be the first step in implementing a pilot program that can be tested and refined as needed. The proposal does not identify a specific translation program, and would make the use of artificial intelligence in the courtroom optional.

"People will test them and they'll get comfort levels with the different platforms," Kapenga said. "That's why we're leaving it more wide open."

RISING COSTS

State statute requires that all individuals with limited English proficiency are entitled to a qualified interpreter during court proceedings. The Americans with Disabilities Act also guarantees those who are deaf or hard of hearing the right to an interpreter.

More than 167,000 Wisconsin residents, or nearly 3% of the state population, identified as speaking English “less than very well” in the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2023 American Community Survey .

Courtroom interpreters must pass a multi-step testing process in order to be certified in Wisconsin. The process includes an orientation, an oral proficiency review and oral and written tests. The state currently has 135 certified court interpreters on its roster, including 71 certified in Spanish and 64 certified in other languages. Forty-one of the Spanish interpreters live in the state.

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BECOME A COURT INTERPRETER?

The role of a court interpreter is much more complicated than simply converting written text from one language to another.

The specialized nature of the field, paired with rising demand nationwide, means counties are spending more each year for qualified courtroom interpreters — sometimes contracting with individuals from across the country, who either travel to Wisconsin to provide in-person interpretation or provide services remotely. The bulk of those costs are absorbed by individual counties, with the state providing a partial reimbursement.

All told, county courts spent more than $3.7 million on interpreter services in 2023, according to the bill's co-authors.

"The beauty is that we’re now in a day and age when AI is able to help us with these things, and why not take advantage of that cost savings?” Maxey said.

DANE COUNTY COURT INTERPRETER COSTS

Waukesha County, for example, spent more than $182,000 on court interpreters last year, compared with just $50,000 spent in 2014.

While Waukesha has seen an increase in demand for Spanish and other language interpreters, "there has also been a sharp decrease in the number of local, in-state interpreters available to attend the proceedings in-person," Monica Paz, Waukesha County clerk of circuit court, said in an email.

Dane is currently the only county court in the state with on-staff interpreters — one full-time and two half-time staffers. The county also contracts with interpreters from across the country for various language needs.

The Dane County court system spent more than $171,000 on courtroom interpreters in 2014. Last year, the county spent more than $408,000 to hire more than 90 different interpreters. This year is on pace to surpass that, with nearly $118,000 spent in the first quarter of 2025 alone.

"It's certainly a significant issue, so I think in that sense we really appreciate the Legislature looking at this in any sense to try to be forward-thinking," Dane County Clerk of Courts Jeff Okazaki said of rising interpreter costs.

ACCURACY OVER EFFICIENCY

But Okazaki also raised concerns about replacing highly skilled interpreters with artificial intelligence in an area where proper translation could play a crucial role in a case's outcome. Legal jargon is dense and complicated, the meaning or use of specific words can vary based on region, and some languages like Spanish are gendered, meaning all nouns are classified as masculine or feminine. All those factors create challenges for artificial intelligence programs built to translate language.

"The whole idea behind interpretation is that they are interpreting meaning and not just translating words," Okazaki said. "That's the most important piece, and the software does not yet have the ability to do that."

Such translation tools continue to become more common. Maxey recalled a recent ride-along with a police officer in which Google Translate was used to communicate with a motorist.

DANE COUNTY COURT INTEREPRETERS

The Dane County court system contracted with court interpreters from across the country in 2024.

But Maxey also underscored the importance of providing an accurate translation.

“It doesn’t matter if they’re there for a simple speeding ticket or you’re on trial for your life," Maxey said. "It needs to be accurate, and that’s where I think that being able to look at what you said on the screen and know that’s what it actually translated.”

Mark Lemley, a lawyer and professor at Stanford Law School, said AI translation is quick and cost effective, but such programs still make mistakes.

"If the alternative is not having a translator, it's clearly an improvement," Lemley said. "But if the idea is to replace existing human translators, I worry that we will see inaccurate translations with no easy way to question them, and that judges and government officials will think they are more reliable than they are."

Annette Zimmerman, a professor in UW-Madison's department of philosophy and co-lead of the university's Uncertainty and AI Group, described the human review process for AI interpretation in the courtroom as "crucial for accuracy" because the technology does not yet guarantee perfect outcomes. In high-stakes courtroom decisions, a human interpreter's expertise and human judgment "is essential for disambiguating potentially confusing claims," she added.

"Human review and guardrails are incredibly important in a high stakes domain like criminal justice, where even one small error can have life-altering unjust consequences," Zimmermann said in an email. "I don't think that the fact that counties would be able to choose not to use AI plausibly counts as a meaningful guardrail, by the way. We need a regulatory framework in place that isn't up to counties to opt in and out of."

Human input is also critical to the nature of courtroom proceedings because those involved in the judicial system "ethically owe it to that person to engage with them on an individual human level to provide the justification for that sentence."

"Taking shortcuts and trying to save costs no matter what risks undermine the deeper purpose of the criminal justice process," Zimmermann said. "Efficiency in our public institutions is an important policy goal, but considerations of efficiency shouldn't outweigh our important individual rights and freedoms."

If Wisconsin courtrooms begin using artificial intelligence for interpreting purposes, Kapenga said constitutionality and due process will be a part of that discussion.

"The court system will always err on the side of the person whose rights are potentially being infringed on, Kapenga said"

https://www.govtech.com/artificial-intelligence/bill-would-allow-ai-assisted-translation-in-wis-courtrooms

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From www.govtech.com - June 13, 11:00 PM

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