Language: English (mozilla)
Join a panel of Common Voice community members who are advancing speech technology for their own languages. Hear about their lived experiences of the anglocentric digital world, and what they've learned working to break that dynamic!
Common Voice Product Lead | Mozilla Foundation
EM Lewis-Jong oversees platform strategy and direction for Mozilla Common Voice. She has a decade of experience in product, tech policy, and applied research, most recently in the GovTech space, where she ran product teams from concept phase to Series A. She started her career as an investigative analyst at a Global Fund, and advocated for legislative amendments with peers at the UK House of Lords. Nominated for the Women in Tech and Rising Stars of Tech awards, she has spoken at FWD50 and Republica, and holds a Churchill Fellowship for her fieldwork on citizen engagement technologies. She studied at the University of Oxford and is a SheCodes Alumna.
I am a Language Community Coordinator for Common Voice at Mozilla Foundation. I am presently a researcher and a PhD candidate in the field of Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics working with one of South Africa's local language Setswana, developing a Word Sense Disambiguator in the context of Setswana-English Machine Translation. Indigenous languages are rapidly becoming extinct thus language preservation is crucial now more than ever. Our languages are more than just tools for communication, they are an inherent part of our culture and identity as a people, therefore preserving languages is preserving our ancestor’s traditions and values. My work is an attempt to contribute to language preservation and addressing the challenge of indigenous languages being under resourced, leading to their internet digital language exclusion through resource, tools and applications development.