On 15 November 2022, ISSAI members, Kuralay Baimenova, Saida Mussakhojayeva, and Rustem Yeshpanov participated in the conference “The Information Space of the Kazakh Language and the Experience of Building the National Corpus”, organized by the Institute of Linguistics named after Akhmet Baitursynuly. The conference took place at the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Kazakhstan and was held within the framework of the 85th birthday of Kazakhstan’s prominent figure, doctor of philosophy, and mathematical linguist Askar Zhubanov. ISSAI was invited to the conference by the Director of the Institute of Linguistics, Dr. Anar Fazylzhan, as the leading scientific institution in Kazakhstan focusing on AI research and machine learning.
The presentation by the ISSAI researchers focused on AI projects for the Kazakh language, namely Kazakh Speech Corpus, Kazakh Speech Corpus 2, Kazakh Text-to-Speech, Kazakh Text-to-Speech 2, and Kazakh Named Entity Recognition Dataset. The presenters explained the projects and showed their demos to the conference attendees. In addition, projects such as Uzbek Speech Corpus, Turkish Speech Corpus and Turkic ASR and TTS were briefly mentioned as part of the corpus development initiatives.
Other conference speakers included members and linguists of the Institute of Linguistics named after Akhmet Baitursynuly. Among others, the following projects were presented:
- “Problems in Encoding Lexical and Semantic Groups in the Works of Askar Zhubanov and Worldwide Experience in Introducing Semantic Designations into Corpora”
- “Automatic Dictionary of the Kazakh language: Synthesis of the Kazakh Word Form”
- “Statistical Calculation and Probability Theory”
- “Worldwide Experience in the Creation of Speech Corpora and Phonetic Aspects of Applied Linguistics in the Works of A. Zhubanov”
The Institute of Linguistics named after Akhmet Baitursynuly is a scientific institution in Kazakhstan specialising in the study of fundamental and practical problems of Kazakh linguistics and Turkology. In 1990, the Institute of Linguistics was named after the prominent statesman, educator, and founder of Kazakh linguistics Akhmet Baitursynuly, who is known in the world of linguistics as the author of the Kazakh alphabet. The Institute conducts research in the fields of grammar, lexicology, phonetics, linguaculture, onomastics, Kazakh terminology, as well as linguocognitology, applied linguistics, corpus linguistics, ethnolinguistics, and the history of Kazakh literary language.