COST Action – UniDive. LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGY AS A RESPONSE TO INCLUSION

Enfoque

Today, there is talk of over-pressure in the classroom. Education is imploding and echoing in the streets, neighborhoods and cities, as is happening in France these days. Excessive pressure comes from at least:

1. The recognition of diversities: linguistic (opposite glottophobia), sexual (opposite xenophobia), religious (opposite islamophobia), gender (opposite homophobia), and culture (opposite racism and xenophobia). Lack of knowledge and fear increase the pressure beyond the possibilities of the citizenry.
2. Loss of integrity: lack of consistency in personal actions and lack of trust in others increases the pressure. The soil of the personal is watered, generating a quagmire of grief, suspicion, anger, and complaint. In the worst case, historical memory is lost and, with it, historical-educational memory. The human being grows, without understanding, increasing the pressure.
3. Ignorance of emerging technologies: paradoxically, while the adult world debates about their lights and shadows, children simply include them. However, when the new tool is friendly, accessible, and free, fear, unease, and pressure return. Implosion is assured.

Natural language processing, as a technology, was worked on at the beginning of the 21st century by researchers in computer science and educational technology at the University of Murcia. The findings were translated into tools that could be useful to follow the teaching-learning process of students. Years later, language technology takes the idiosyncrasies, i.e. the finer aspects of spoken language, and transforms them into digital code through the establishment of fixed linguistic universals. The European COST UniDive Action (https://www.cost.eu/actions/CA21167/) is divided into four working groups that feed into each other under the common goal of promoting linguistic diversity by means of natural language processing technology.

The experience carried out using the dynamics proposed in UniDive is implemented in a culturally diverse building where a total of nine different languages are recognized. The questionnaire was used to collect the information, and the annotation was done manually. WhasApp and Google translators were used. The syntactic and morphological analyses were based on notions presented at the 1st UniDive Meeting held in March 2023 and PARSEME is being studied as a linguistic recording tool.

It is worth discussing the sources of pressure that are leading to an imploding education. For the first source, educational support solutions are fundamental. Both ordinary and specific measures are present in state and regional policies and must be addressed.  To relieve the pressure coming from the second source, Fischer’s Decalogue (2023) is useful. Finally, the third source requires creativity, assuming that there are other ways of educating. The sustainable development goals, digital competence in teaching, and digital entrepreneurship are presented as possible solutions.