Innovations in Indigenous Language NLP and ASR

Significant advancements have been made in the realm of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in recent years. However, Indigenous communities are often left in the shadows of these advancements as their development rarely takes unique and critical aspects of Indigenous language structure and culture into consideration. In order to ensure that the development of NLP tools is not harmful to Indigenous communities, it is important to focus on approaches that center Indigenous languages and ways of knowing. This presentation will highlight recent breakthroughs in NLP for under-resourced languages, with a focus on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Indigenous languages of the Americas.