Helping Artificial Intelligence to Learn Indigenous Cultures

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One such tool is IVOW’s Native Knowledge Graphor IKG, an early-development cultural engine that focuses on storytelling about Indigenous recipes and culinary practices. After meeting the IVOW team in 2018, Mr. Yarlott founded IKG, a kind of visualization of a dataset to capture Indigenous information.

“You know in dramas, you see someone trying to solve a mystery and they have a corkboard and little musical notes and string in between?” said Mr Yarlott. “This is basically what IKG is for, but for cultural information.”

The first step was to collect the data. The team focused on the kitchen as it is a part of life shared by all people. They gathered recipes and related stories from both the public and team members.

Mr. Monteith chose to go into the story. Three Sisters Stew, a recipe he created from symbiotic crops (corn, beans, and squash) said these ingredients were known among Indigenous peoples wherever they were grown. He said the story of the Three Sisters is not just a recipe, but a way to teach sustainability practices like water conservation. “This is a great metaphor for what we need to do as society and people around the world,” said Mr Monteith.

Using Neo4J, a graphical database management system, recipes were broken down into components (title, ingredients, instructions, and related stories) and labeled with information such as the tribe of origin or whether the recipe was contemporary or historical, or had roots in folklore. . This dataset was then entered into Dialogflow, a natural language processing platform so it could be fed to a chatbot – in this case, Sina the storytellerSiri-like speech agent designed by IVOW. Currently, anyone can interact with the early version via Google Assistant.

The tools and techniques for creating IKG are designed to be simple enough for anyone to use, not just those with a computer science background. And IKG only uses information that is widely available or that the team has permission to use from their tribe, group and nation.

Yet there are difficulties. The process is labor-intensive and expensive; IVOW is a self-funded initiative and the work of the collaborators is voluntary.

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