COOKEVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — We all hear a lot of discussions surrounding AI today, both the uses it can have and the concerns about it. A team believes it can be used for a powerful purpose, to help preserve an endangered language.
Dr. Jesse Roberts of Tennessee Tech University is an assistant professor of computer science teaching machine learning and artificial intelligence. He's in the midst of a challenge, one where technology meets something with deep roots in this part of the country.
"It's a puzzle we don't know the solution to," he said. "It's a puzzle, but it's a very rewarding puzzle to solve."
Not very far from the university is Standing Stone State Park. In the 1700s, it was home to many Cherokee. In nearby Monterey, part of a stone has a historical significance.
"This would have been considered part of the Cherokee historical boundary," Jesse said.
Jesse's working with a team also including Ben Frey of the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
"I'm a citizen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians," Ben said.
What they're trying to do is use AI to create an interactive tool that can teach and preserve the Cherokee language. There's an urgency to this with one of the dialects being especially endangered.
"In the Eastern Band there are roughly 140 first language speakers left," Jesse said. "Languages die very frequently.
"It's really frightening in an existential way," Ben said.
Their work started with entering the Cherokee language and recordings from fluent speakers into AI tools, but it wasn't going to be that simple.
"Linguistically, it's a very different language," Ben said.
"We're using a language that's a completely different structure," Jesse added.
"All the word parts in Cherokee are very informationally dense," Ben continued. "That makes it hard to correlate one-to-one with English words. Each part of a word carries an important piece and meaning."
The AI tools aren't yet processing that.
"Part of it is a scarcity of data," Ben said. "Most languages are structured like English or Spanish or Mandarin."
He used an example of how one particular Cherokee word would mean an entire sentence in English.
"It means I'm going off to get a liquid object," Ben continued. "If you were to ask me the word mother in Cherokee, I couldn't really tell you because you have to specify whose mother it is."
"We don't have the 40 years of internet data in Cherokee that we have in English," Jesse said.
Now, Jesse's having conversations with his classes about rethinking the way they introduce the language to various AI tools. The group's looking for more research funds for work they feel very strongly has a cultural, historical importance.
"The pie in the sky dream is we'll have a fully animated Cherokee speaker that lives in your computer," Ben said. "It'll teach you the Cherokee language, work on your pronunciation with you, tell you stories in the language, or explain grammar points to you."
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Fundraising efforts are underway in Brownsville and Nutbush, TN to build a statue for a major superstar who was raised there, Anna Mae Bullock. You probably know her by her stage name, Tina Turner. I was a huge fan of Tina and glad to see efforts are underway to showcase more of her ties to West Tennessee.
-Lelan Statom
