I’m Barbara Westerveld, a Descriptive Linguist with an MA focused on language diversity in Sub-Saharan Africa, currently pursuing a PhD project on building language models for a K10 cluster of Bantu languages. I combine academic training with hands-on NLP/NLU/ML work to advance low-resource language technologies. Over the years I’ve moved from scholarly linguistics to impactful tech collaborations, serving as a Computational Linguist and NLU specialist in Barcelona. My work spans Dutch NLP/NLU/NLG, speech processing, annotation, and rule-based language engineering, always aiming to make language technology inclusive and effective for diverse communities.…I’m Barbara Westerveld, a Descriptive Linguist with an MA focused on language diversity in Sub-Saharan Africa, currently pursuing a PhD project on building language models for a K10 cluster of Bantu languages. I combine academic training with hands-on NLP/NLU/ML work to advance low-resource language technologies. Over the years I’ve moved from scholarly linguistics to impactful tech collaborations, serving as a Computational Linguist and NLU specialist in Barcelona. My work spans Dutch NLP/NLU/NLG, speech processing, annotation, and rule-based language engineering, always aiming to make language technology inclusive and effective for diverse communities.WWWW…