Wor(l)ds in Other Wor(l)ds Conference
In 2015 the Eloise Garmendia Bieter Chair in Basque Studies was created through an agreement between Boise State and the Etxepare Basque Institute. The goal of this Chair is to strengthen the academic presence of Basque culture at the university and in the Treasure Valley community. Every year the Basque Studies section invites a professor to teach graduate students with the aim of highlighting the study of and research into Basque language and culture.
Igor Leturia will be the visiting scholar for the EGB Chair and the Keynote speaker for the international conference: TRANSLATION: Wor(l)ds in Other Wor(l)ds (September 14-17, 2023).
Igor Leturia holds an Engineer degree in Computer Science from the University of Mondragon (1989-1993), a degree in Computer Science from the Paul Sabatier University of Toulouse (1993-1994), and am Engineer degree in Systems Electronics from the University of Mondragon (1994-1996). He also holds a Master’s Degree in Language Technologies from the University of the Basque Country (2001-2003) and a Master’s Degree in Language Analysis and Processing from the University of the Basque Country (2008-2009). He also holds a Ph.D. in Language Technologies from the University of the Basque Country (2014), for his thesis “The Web as Corpus of Basque”.
During his studies, he worked as a part-time research assistant at the Ikerlan research center (1990-1993 and 1994-1996). He is a founding partner of the company SOME Software Innovation, where he worked as CTO (1996- 1998). He also worked at EMUN Kooperatiba Elkartea as ICT Director (1998-2003).
Since 2003, he has been working at Elhuyar Fundazioa in the department of Research and Development in Language Technologies for Basque, of which he was the Director from 2008 to 2014, and since 2014 he has been the director of the Speech Technologies area. For years, his main research area has been text corpora and, in particular, the use of the web as a source of corpora, which was the subject of his Ph.D. thesis. In recent years, he has been working on speech technologies, both ASR and TTS. In ASR, he has led the development of Aditu, an automatic transcription/subtitling service for the Basque language, which also allows the automatic translation of these transcriptions and subtitles into different languages. In the field of TTS, he has participated in the creation of neural TTS technology for Basque (monospeaker, multispeaker, translingual…). He is also involved in a project that aims to combine ASR, MT and TTS to provide automatic dubbing and speech-to-speech translation between Basque and other languages. He also participates in the development of MT, TTS and ASR technology for other minority languages such as Occitan and its variants or Aragonese, in collaboration with regional agents, as well as in the development of ASR technology for dialectal variants of Basque.