The language sciences have taken an enormous flight over the last 20 years, and have found practical applications with tremendous impact. Machine translation, speech recognition, chatbots and personal assistants have radically transformed people’s everyday lives. 

However, these new technologies have two major methodological drawbacks: they lack transparency and are heavily skewed towards mainstream language varieties.

Moreover, while most applications developed to date have been driven by economic gain, the language sciences have the potential to yield tremendous societal gain as well, a potential that remains largely unexploited.

We pursue novel methods and applications from a human-centric perspective: methods that add transparency and are not restricted to mainstream languages, and applications for an inclusive and safe society.