This project is led by Prof See-Kiong Ng and conducted by a collaboration between the Singapore data science research team at the Institute of Data Science and the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore (NUS), and the multi-institutional NZ data science research team led by renowned professors from Massey University, the University of Auckland, and the University of Waikato. The jointly developed intelligent conversational Q&A system will provide state-of-the-art speech recognition, machine translation, Q&A, text-to-speech synthesis for language learning and revitalisation efforts, and more effective public systems and outreach services. The application then has the potential to extend to the many other indigenous and vernacular languages in the world.

This collaboration is funded by Singapore’s National Research Foundation and Singapore Data Science Consortium, and the Catalyst: Strategic – New Zealand-Singapore Data Science Research Programme of New Zealand’s Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment (MBIE), under the Government-wide New Zealand-Singapore Enhanced Partnership.