Preserving human languages and cultures in the age of AI by Dr Maite Melero

As AI-driven language technologies become increasingly central to global communication, concerns grow about their impact on linguistic diversity and cultural heritage. This lecture examines the historical forces shaping language dominance and extinction, and explores how current advances in Natural Language Processing and large language models may both endanger and enable the preservation of non-global languages. Grounded in perspectives from linguistics, language technologies, and AI ethics, the talk calls for action to ensure that technological innovation supports equitable and culturally aware language futures.

Maite Melero she has been a researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) since 2019, where she leads the Machine Translation Group within the Language Technologies Unit. Her research addresses key challenges in natural language processing, with a particular focus on low-resource languages and the development of open-source AI tools. She is actively involved in national and European R\&D projects that explore various aspects of machine translation and computational language processing. Before joining BSC, she was a researcher at Pompeu Fabra University and at Microsoft Research, where she led the development of the Spanish grammar checker and collaborated on the Microsoft Translator project.

She has served as an advisor to the Spanish Secretary of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence (SEDIA) and to the Government of Catalonia on issues related to machine translation and language technologies. She has also collaborated with the European Parliament on initiatives promoting linguistic equality in the digital age. She has organized international events such as the MultilingualBIO workshops, the SIGUL workshop series on low-resource languages, and the LT4All 2025 conference promoted by UNESCO.

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