De La Salle University (DLSU) has received an unrestricted gift of $10,000 from Google Asia Pacific to support innovative research in the field of natural language processing. The grant was awarded in recognition of the work of Dr. Charibeth K. Cheng, Associate Dean of the College of Computer Studies and Senior Researcher at the Center for Language Technologies, on the “Development of a Filipino Tokenizer for Natural Language Processing.”
The award is part of Google’s ongoing Academic Research Awards program, which aims to foster excellence in academic research worldwide. In this case, Google acknowledged the importance of Dr. Cheng’s project in advancing computational tools that can process and understand the Filipino language — an essential step in making digital technologies more inclusive and accessible to Filipino speakers. Additionally, Dr. Cheng was awarded $20,000 in GCP credits, which will allow her and her students to build solutions for the Filipino language using Google’s Cloud Platform services.
The funding will support further development of the Filipino tokenizer—a key component in enabling machines to understand and generate language in Filipino. This work contributes to bridging the gap between global AI technologies and local linguistic contexts, ensuring that Filipino remains a functional and relevant language in the digital age.