News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
A Tennessee Tech professor taking part in an effort to use artificial intelligence to try and preserve the Cherokee language.
Computer Science Assistant Professor Jesse Roberts said the Cherokee language has become one of many indigenous endangered languages. Roberts said AI uses online databases to understand languages such as English. However, Roberts said the Cherokee language does not have much of an online database, which is a big reason why AI struggles to comprehend the language.
“If you do ask Chat GPT or other large language models you know questions about the Cherokee language or other endangered languages,” Roberts said. “But we have mostly worked with Cherokee, and what we find is that it will confidently tell you an incorrect answer.”
Roberts said just over 100 people who speak Cherokee as a primary language are living today.
Roberts said people who speak Cherokee say that most AI programs are saying jibberish when translating the language. Roberts said he is helping to try and preserve the Cherokee language as his family has ties to the Cherokee region in North Carolina.
“It’s always been something that I have identified as part of who I am either just because of the region I’m from or some distant familiar tie like that,” Roberts said. “And so it’s always been something that was valuable to me as a person.”
Roberts said the reason there are so few primary Cherokee-speaking people is that more common languages like English are required for jobs and education in today’s world, so Cherokee is not being taught as a primary language. Roberts said that if the Cherokee language became extinct, it would be a devastating loss.
“Beyond just the fact that we would lose the ability to speak Cherokee, which is a large part of cultural identity is the language itself,” Roberts said. “Beyond just that loss there is also a loss of history of the people and the understanding of that history.”
Roberts said the Cherokee language is a very complex language where fluent speakers can create words on the fly. Roberts said there is a gap in understanding the Cherokee language between people who speak Cherokee as their primary language and people who speak Cherokee as a secondary language. Roberts said he and several others are about one year into the project and are still trying to understand the problems that AI has with the Cherokee language and hopes to eventually find a solution to help AI systems learn the language.
