Academician Rasim Alguliyev: "One of the vital missions of the digital state is to ensure linguistic sovereignty"

Academician Rasim Alguliyev: "One of the vital missions of the digital state is to ensure linguistic sovereignty"

"One of the key requirements of the newly forming digital state architecture in our country is the establishment of the Azerbaijani language ecosystem within the virtual environment—in other words, securing linguistic sovereignty as an essential element of national cyber-sovereignty," academician Rasim Alguliyev, Vice-President of ANAS and Director General of the Institute of Information Technology under the Ministry of Science and Education, said in a statement to AZERTAC.

The academician noted that the Azerbaijani language must be developed not only as a means of daily and official communication within society, but also as a primary tool for digital communication in the virtual space. The scholar highlighted that the transformation of the Azerbaijani language into a fully functional digital language for Natural Language Processing (NLP), artificial intelligence, social networks, and other digital platforms is one of the crucial tasks.

Academician Rasim Alguliyev emphasized the importance of forming a "digital Azerbaijani language" alongside the natural Azerbaijani language, within the context of shaping the country's new digital architecture under the leadership of President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev, as well as creating a unified online linguistic ecosystem covering all its functional capabilities and services. He noted that the formation of such an ecosystem will create broad opportunities for establishing human-computer and computer-to-computer interactions on digital platforms based on the Azerbaijani language, expanding communication capabilities, and enhancing the quality of translations from this language into other languages.

The General Director of the Institute emphasized that developing the Azerbaijani language is extremely important not only as the mother tongue—the primary carrier of national identity and cultural heritage—but also as a language of digital technologies and artificial intelligence: “Realizing these initiatives and ideas within the digital government environment will, along with preserving and developing the Azerbaijani language, create conditions for further strengthening the country’s linguistic sovereignty. At the same time, it will open broad opportunities for protecting the Azerbaijani language from cyber threats in the global information space and developing effective countermeasures against them.”

The scientist also provided information about the research conducted on forming the Azerbaijani language ecosystem in the online environment. He stated that the scientists and specialists of the Institute of Information Technology have created the National Terminology Information System, the "State Information System of Names and Surnames," and the National Transliteration System as key components of this ecosystem. The General Director highlighted that the institute's staff members are currently conducting research on forming and identifying individuals' linguistic corpora on digital platforms through the application of artificial intelligence and natural language processing technologies, as well as developing mechanisms to detect and combat cyber threats, including disinformation, in Azerbaijani-language texts.