Te Reo Irirangi o Te Hiku o Te Ika Smart Ideas funded projects

As communities around Aotearoa come to grips with the impacts of climate change and adverse weather conditions, they look to researchers, community leaders and decision-makers for guidance to help them move towards climate resilience. Some communities also look to ancestral knowledge, mātauranga Māori, for guidance and the right path forward. For researchers that seek to bring those two knowledge systems together, there is no technology available to support them.

The work Te Hiku Media proposes will be to explore a collaborative platform that will synthesise and analyse data in te reo Māori and NZ English using natural language processing (NLP) tools to support research, policy and strategy development for climate action. The project will leverage existing tools, including an accurate bilingual automatic speech transcription for te reo Māori and NZ English, and build new tools that will make working with te reo Māori data and mātauranga Māori easier and more effective. The project will focus on creating and finetuning language tools for climate change research and mātauranga Māori.

Leaders across our communities are being asked to make critical decisions with their teams of people expected to provide the best evidence to support those decisions. A platform that makes domain specific NLP tools and the resulting output accessible for those decision-makers in the community will be explored, getting the data and evidence into the hands of those that need it. Importantly, this project will remove barriers for the community to engage in research using te reo Māori ensuring that Māori knowledge and perspectives can be included.

For more information about the project, email info@tehiku.co.nz