KhmerTimes-Jan 22, 2025
In a significant step and journey towards the Artificial Intelligence (AI) development in Southeast Asia, Cambodia and Singapore marked a landmark agreement yesterday to enhance the Khmer Language model through AI. The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed by Chhem Siriwat, the President of AI Forum Cambodia, and Darius Liu, Darius Liu, Head of Strategy, Partnership and Growth at Singapore’s national AI development programme AI Singapore, at the Cambodia University of Technology and Science (CamTech University). The agreement was signed under the project of AI Singapore called Southeast Asian Language is One Network (Sea-Lion), a family of open-source Large Language Model (LLM) that better understands Southeast Asia’s (SEA) diverse contexts, languages and cultures. Anchored by the Products Pillar of AI Singapore, the project aims to create LLM that caters to under-represented population groups and low resource languages in the SEA region. By developing the Khmer LLM, Siriwat emphasized that the project has the potential to breach linguistic and digital devices, empower local communities and position Cambodia as a contributor to the global AI landscape. William Tjhi, AI Singapore’s Head, Applied Research for Foundation Models (ARF) told Khmer Times yesterday that the first phase of the agreement will focus on the questionnaires and collection of data. “In the case of Khmer, the base foundation itself is not strong enough for us to perform the instruction, therefore, we need to increase the base capability of the AI, and we need help from the media to increase the volume of raw Khmer data,” said William. “We explore another idea of taking up PDF data and then translating into texts, as well as taking the speech and voice data to transcribe into text.” Read more at:
https://www.khmertimeskh.com/501627225/khmer-language-gets-ai-infusion/
