Project Goals
This isn’t a ‘Northern Tutchone Duolingo.’ With fewer than a dozen speakers, we pair a language model with holopresence and VR so humour, spirit, and intergenerational connection go beyond audio alone.
Preserve the Na-Cho Nyäk Dun dialect of Northern Tutchone
Preserve and present NND culture, traditions, and stories
Support the increase in Northern Tutchone speakers
Post-Project: Make the framework open source to support language preservation and reignition for others
Our Approach
This multi-year project is just beginning. Currently, the project team is collecting language data and examples of community belongings and establishing the technological framework and pedagogical approach. The collection will last the life cycle of the project, and potentially beyond, relying on community participation and volunteers to collaborate on this cultural and language record-making. Training the language model and the development of educational applications is based on the ongoing data collection (video recordings, audio archives, and other sources). Later phases will include extensive studies to evaluate the model and applications, and make them available to the community.
Data Sovereignty
This three-year initiative is informed by data sovereignty principles, where the First Nation of Na-Cho Nyäk Dun retains the intellectual and copyright authority of the work and controls access to what at times is Sacred Knowledge. The data shared to train the AI language model will not be accessible or used without the consent of the First Nation of Na-Cho Nyäk Dun. It is only through this partnership built upon trust, respect, and information ownership that this work is possible.
Technology
The technological structure of Kwän Dék’án’ Do project is organized in three layers:
- The AI model of the language and community knowledge
- A set of educational and cultural applications that use community recordings and belongings together with the AI model to provide digital experiences
- A multi-platform software framework that allows the applications to be accessed in a variety of forms such as holopresence, immersive virtual reality, mobile, and desktop.
We refer to these three layers as AI (model), UX (apps), and UI (platform), respectively.
