Sponsored Projects

Language Parties (Aesop Foundation, 2019-20, CDU Foundation 2020-21, Indigenous Language and Arts Program 2024). Understanding how to celebrate linguistic diversity in ways that encourage speakers of minority languages to keep their languages strong and to use them in urban spaces. We are focussing on developing a storytelling format, a fresh and intimate style of gathering that celebrates the sea of languages spoken in our cities, towns, and neighbourhoods. In 2024/25 we are running events in the Kimberley Region of NW Australia.

First Nations AI: Country, Climate, Communication (Australian Research Council, 2024-28). Developing a systematic account of artificial intelligence and its possibilities in climate change communication in remote First Nations communities in northern Australia.

Investing in Aboriginal Languages (Australian Research Council 2021-24). Developing a comprehensive account of Aboriginal language programs and what makes them effective and sustainable. This project is building local capacity to design and evaluate programs, informing investments in Aboriginal languages, and the kinds of returns to expect.

Mobile Software for Oral Language Learning in Arnhem Land (Australian Government Indigenous Languages and Arts Program, 2019-21). Designing and developing mobile technologies for the Kunwinjku language of West Arnhem to enable more effective collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians working together on country.

Learning English and Aboriginal Languages for Work (Australian Research Council Discovery Project, 2019-22). Leveraging mobile technologies to enrich the communication between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians working together on Aboriginal country.

Building Pride and Resilience to Keep Aboriginal Languages Strong (CDU Internal Funding, 2020-21). Designing new ways for non-Aboriginal people to learn an Aboriginal language, and exploring the impact on pride and resilience, based in a ranger program, an arts centre, and other intercultural spaces in West Arnhem.

Languages for Storytelling (CDU Internal Funding, 2020-21). Designing new ways to share knowledge online in language for learning technology and complex environmental understanding.

Sustainable Literacy

Supporting text input by learners, accelerating transcription and language learning, with a focus on Australian Aboriginal languages

Le Ferrand, É, S Bird and L Besacier (2021). Phone based keyword spotting for transcribing very low resource languages, Proceedings of the 19th Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association, pp. 79-86.

Lane, W and S Bird (2021). Local word discovery for interactive transcription, Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 2058-2067.

Lane, W, M Bettinson and S Bird (2021). A computational model for interactive transcription, Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Data Science with Human in the Loop: Language Advances.

Lane, W and S Bird (2020). Language modeling for morphologically rich languages: Character-aware modeling for word-level prediction, Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics.

Le Ferrand, É, S Bird and L Besacier (2020). Enabling interactive transcription in an Indigenous community, Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics.

Bird, S (2020). Sparse transcription, Computational Linguistics 46, 713–744.

Lane, W and S Bird (2020). Bootstrapping techniques for polysynthetic morphological analysis, Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Lane, W and S Bird (2019). Towards A Robust Morphological Analyzer for Kunwinjku, Proceedings of the 17th Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association.

Sustainable Orality

Supporting transmission of oral culture; identifying the mechanisms that enable successful Aboriginal language programs

Wiltshire, B, S Bird and R Hardwick (2022). Understanding how language revitalisation works: A realist synthesis. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development.

Bettinson, M and S Bird (2021). Collaborative fieldwork with custom mobile apps. Language Documentation and Conservation, 15, 411-432.

Willsher, M and J Oldfield (2020). History in the Now: Asserting Indigenous difference in “Top End” higher education using culturally responsive pedagogy, Cultural Competence and the Higher Education Sector, 197

Kutay, C, D Szapiro, J Garcia, W Raffe (2020). Learning on Country: A game-based approach towards preserving an Australian Aboriginal language, Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computers in Education.

Jokhu, PD and C Kutay (2020). Observations on appropriate technology application in Indigenous community using system dynamics modelling, Sustainability, 12, p2245.

Bow, C (2020). TELL for Indigenous Australian languages, Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computers in Education.

Bird, S (2020). Decolonising speech and language technology, Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics.

Bird, S (2019). Designing for language revitalisation, Proceedings of the UNESCO Conference on Language Technology for All.

Oldfield, J and JL Bianco (2019). A long unfinished struggle: literacy and Indigenous cultural and language rights. In: Rennie J., Harper H. (eds) Literacy Education and Indigenous Australians, Language Policy Vol 19, 165-184

Wiltshire, B and S Bird (2019). Designing a Language Program to Serve Multiple Language Ideologies, 50th Annual Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society.

Bettinson, M and S Bird (2018). Image-Gesture-Voice: A web component for eliciting speech, Workshop on Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages, 11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation.

Bird, S (2018). Designing mobile applications for endangered languages, Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages.

Sustainable Identity

Exploring authentic and sustainable practices in sharing Indigenous knowledge through tourism, storytelling, and archives

Bird, S and G Simons (2021). Towards an agenda for open language archiving. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Digital Language Archives, pp25-28.

Curtin, N, S Bird and R Wallace (in prep). Touring our own backyards: Visitor perspectives on Indigenous tourism engagement. Manuscript.

Curtin, N and S Bird (2021). “We are reconciliators”: When Indigenous tourism begins with agency. Journal of Sustainable Tourism.

Curtin, N, S Bird and T Woodroffe (2021). ‘More than a word’: Practicing reconciliation through Indigenous knowledge-sharing in tourism. The Conversation.

Bednall, J (2000). Temporal, aspectual and modal expression in Anindilyakwa, the language of the Groote Eylandt archipelago, Australia. PhD thesis, Australian National University & Université de Paris.

Bow, C and P Hepworth (2019). Observing and respecting diverse knowledge traditions in a digital archive of Indigenous language materials, Journal of Copyright in Education and Librarianship 3, 1-36.

Bow, C (2019). Diverse socio-technical aspects of a digital archive of Aboriginal languages, Archives and Manuscripts 47, 94-112.

Simons, G and S Bird (2019). Expressing language resource metadata as linked data: The case of the Open Language Archives Community, in Pareja-Lora et al, Development of Linguistic Linked Open Data Resources for Collaborative Data-Intensive Research in the Language Sciences. 117-131 MIT Press.

Storytelling for knowledge sharing

Exploring knowledge sharing both ways in the areas of Engineering, IT and Environment

Lisa Roberts, Cat Kutay, Jess Melbourne-Thomas, Katherina Petrou, Tracey M. Benson, Danae Fiore, Paul Fletcher, Ellery Johnson, Melissa Silk, Stephen Taberner, Victor Vargas Filgueira, Andrew J. Constable (2021) Enabling Enduring Evidence-Based Policy for the Southern Ocean Through Cultural Arts Practices In: Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. 9, p. 284

Cat Kutay, Deborah Szapiro, Jaime Garcia, William Raffe (2020) Learning on country: A game-based approach towards preserving an Australian Aboriginal language. In: ICCE 2020 – 28th International Conference on Computers in Education, Proceedings; vol. 1

Cat Kutay (2019)  Locating knowledge In: Archives and Manuscripts. 47, 1, p. 72-93 22 p.

Cat Kutay (2020) Caretaking Aboriginal Australian Knowledges Online In: ab-Original 4:1-2