Evolution based approaches to the preservation of endangered natural languages

Cultural algorithms, a form of evolutionary programming, employ a dual inheritance mechanism at population and knowledge levels to support problem solving, reasoning and knowledge extraction. Domain knowledge is extracted and separated from individuals within a population and is placed in a belief space. Hierarchical structures employed in the belief space help to accelerate and guide population evolution. The structure of the cultural algorithm lends itself well to a data rich, but knowledge poor distributed environment. In this paper we investigate the use of cultural algorithms to collect and mediate information collected from Web searches and Web services related to the task of acquiring and preserving knowledge about endangered languages where this knowledge about endangered languages where this knowledge is stored in a number of disparate sites.