Presentation

This talk will begin by exploring the motivations behind creating a Choctaw language chatbot designed to improve conversational fluency. The development process will be described and will highlight some implementation challenges such as orthographic variation and building an effective knowledge base. Additional examples of how technology can contribute to language revitalization and learning will also be demonstrated.

Bio

Jacqueline “Lina” Brixey received her PhD in Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC) in 2024, and focuses her research on Indigenous and endangered languages, dialogue systems, and bilingualism. As a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, Lina is committed to supporting and empowering Native American communities through technology and education and has created the world’s first Choctaw language corpus — a collection of written and spoken texts essential for the study of languages — a bilingual chatbot, and a dialogue system for language documentation. She will join the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a postdoc in the fall of 2025.

Website: www.jacqueline-brixey.com