Antonios Anastasopoulos, Assistant Professor, Computer Science, received funding from the National Science Foundation for: "CCRI: Planning-C: Facilitating Language Technologies for Crisis Response."
This CISE Computing Research Infrastructure (CCRI) planning grant will lay out a concrete path for using language technologies for crisis/disaster response that will be useful for everyone. This requires developing crucial infrastructure to support research toward technological solutions that enable and support communications in crisis scenarios.
Specifically, the project will produce a thorough survey of language technologies for crisis response in order to identify stakeholders and literature gaps. The team will then curate plans for research infrastructure, which facilitate further research in this under-studied area. The infrastructure will consist of datasets applicable to carefully curated crisis/disaster scenarios tied to example community-language scenarios (e.g. Haitian Creole for an earthquake response in Haiti) that are necessary for communication with vulnerable populations.
The researchers will disseminate the results via a workshop, which will bring together scholars focusing on natural language processing (NLP), experts in disaster relief, linguistics, and human-computer interaction, as well as representatives from local speech communities. This will facilitate a research community focused on language technologies for crisis response with representation from all stakeholders.
Anastasopoulos received $98,899 from NSF for this project. Funding began in March 2023 and will end in Feb. 2024.
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