Impact case study database

Research undertaken by Bangor’s Language Technology Unit (LTU) has substantially modernized approaches to the use of the Welsh language and informed practice more broadly in the area of less-resourced languages. Research has had impact in four key areas: Influencing Policy; Fostering the Daily Use of Welsh; Developing Assistive Technology; and Supporting Industry.

Researchers have influenced policy in Wales and globally. Professor Delyth Prys and Dewi Jones have served as advisors on the Welsh Government (WG) Welsh Language Technology Board since 2012, helping inform the approach to language revitalization through language technologies in WG’s strategy Cymraeg 2050 (2017). The subsequent Welsh Language Technology Action Plan (2018) references LTU work, highlighting speech technology, machine translation and conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI), together with terminology, lexicography and corpora resources [5.1]. On a global level, D. Prys, Jones, Andrews and G. Prys have advised on UNESCO’s LT4All initiative, the Digital Language Diversity Project (2015-2018) [5.2] and the successful EU Parliament Resolution on Language Equality in the Digital Age (adopted 11 September 2018). The Rapporteur, an MEP, referenced LTU research in her parliamentary speech [5.3]. This resolution has now resulted in the PPPA-LANGEQ-2020 call for ‘Developing a strategic research, innovation and implementation agenda and a roadmap for achieving full digital language equality in Europe by 2030.’

Research has directly influenced the public’s use of Welsh. Cysgliad is credited by the Welsh Language Commissioner with helping members of the public gain confidence in writing Welsh, as well as being an essential aid in education and for translators and professional administrators [5.4]. Language technology tools developed by LTU researchers are in daily use across Wales The Welsh Language Commissioner mandates all public authorities to install Welsh spelling and grammar checkers on their computers for which Cysgliad is the only available product [5.5]. During October 2020, approximately 1,000,000 words per week were spell- and grammar-checked on the free website Cysill Ar-lein. Between September 2015 and October 2020 approximately 270,000,000 words were added to the Cysill Ar-lein corpus. As of 7 October 2020, Cysgliad is licenced to 492 public and private authorities in Wales, and individual licences (paid for) total 5,392. In 2020, the Welsh Government sponsored free Cysgliad licences for the public, schools and SMEs to help during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the first six months of the offer (between May and October 2020), an additional free 4125 licences were downloaded.

Between August 2013 and October 2020, the Ap Geiriaduron, including Geiriadur Termau’r Coleg Cymraeg, was downloaded 230,646 times. A review (24 July 2019) on Google Play states “This is an incredible app for searching a word I don’t know in a welsh text”. Between March 2015 and October 2020 Vocab, with a unique identifier key downloadable from the National Terminology Portal, was used on 68,537 unique Welsh web pages and on 19 websites, including BBC CymruFyw and Golwg360, and 544,844 word searches were carried out. Development of the Macsen personal assistant has changed attitudes on the possibilities of Welsh language technologies across the generations, evidenced by the positive responses of schoolchildren employing Bangor language technology during coding sessions to make a robot talk in Welsh [5.6].

Research in Welsh speech technology has improved the lives of visually impaired Welsh-speakers, as well as those with reduced mobility and communication difficulties [5.7]. Users were previously unable to access Welsh text-to-speech, and Welsh voice-activated applications. Tools and resources for Welsh speech technology, published by LTU under open licences, fed into improved synthetic voices developed also by commercial companies e.g. Ivona (since acquired by Amazon). The Trawsgrifiwr program is also being used by the National Library of Wales to help their volunteers transcribe audio material from their broadcast archives for their Voice2Text project. The Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) and others use these synthetic Welsh-speaking voices to enable visually impaired users to access Welsh text-to-speech. In April 2017, the speech recognition research led to Lleisiwr, a joint Bangor University / NHS project whereby users about to lose their power of speech can bank their voice and have it rebuilt as a synthetic voice, as shown in an S4C documentary programme ‘Drych: Achub Llais John Wyn’ (April 2019) [5.8]. Researchers were awarded the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists’ Giving Voice Award for their “outstanding commitment to raising awareness of people’s speech, language and communication needs at a national level” in September 2019 [5.9].

Research has helped companies locally and globally to develop new products, providing economic stimulus to peripheral areas and giving Welsh an international presence. In 2017 Facebook expressed appreciation of LTU-developed resources: “thanks a lot for the pointer […] since this is Apache 2.0, we have been able to download this data already” [5.10]. Pioneering use of crowdsourcing for the Paldaruo speech-corpus has informed methodologies used by major international companies to gather speech data for multiple languages. Mozilla adopted this approach for its Common Voice project [5.11] and the Paldaruo corpus itself has been downloaded 73 times by other developers. The containerized version of the Welsh/English machine translation Moses system in Docker enables translation companies to build their own translation engines from legacy translations. It has been downloaded 415 times through the National Portal. It led to a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) between 2017 and 2019 [3.g] with a local translation company, Cymen, (awarded an A [outstanding] grade) and also led to funding from the Innovate UK Accelerated COVID-19 Response Call [3.j] in 2020, enabling LTU to work with two local companies, Animated Technologies Ltd and Zero Dependencies Ltd, and Menai Science Park (MSparc), to develop Inclusive and Advanced Online Conferencing, including multilingual translation functions.