A lecture by Petro Orynycz, an AI engineer and computational linguist from Washington, D.C.

We are delighted to announce that Petro Orynycz will be delivering a guest lecture on his cutting-edge research.

Date: Thursday, April 16, 2026, 11:15 AM

Lecture room: Coming soon...

Title: AI Tools for Rusyn and Lemko: Combating Language Loss in East Slovakia and Beyond

Abstract: Language shift and loss among minority communities in eastern Slovakia constitute a serious cultural and social challenge. Research on Indigenous communities has established a strong link between disruptions in linguistic and cultural continuity and significantly elevated risks of adverse health outcomes, including higher rates of substance abuse, diabetes, interpersonal violence, and suicide, with some studies documenting suicide rates up to six times higher in communities with lower levels of ancestral-language knowledge. According to Slovak census data, mother-tongue declarations for several minority languages changed substantially between 2011 and 2021, with notable declines for Hungarian and Rusyn at the national level, while the strongest concentrations of minority-language mother tongues in eastern Slovakia remain in the Prešov and Košice regions. These shifts reflect continued pressure toward language shift. Recent advances in artificial intelligence offer a promising countermeasure by empowering both heritage speakers and new speakers to use their language immediately and at minimal cost. The lecture presents a Czech- and Slovak-to-Rusyn translation engine developed by fine-tuning a neural machine translation model from the University of Helsinki’s OPUS-MT framework. This tool, which also supports Lemko in Poland at LemkoTran.com, is freely accessible at Rusynator.com. A code kit for the revitalization of other low-resource languages is being made available in the region through ByteClub.ai.

Bio: Petro Orynycz (Петро Оринич) is an AI engineer and computational linguist from Washington, DC, with Lemko/Rusyn family roots in Torysky, Medzilaborce, and Zahoczewie (today in Slovakia and Poland). A graduate of the Institute of Eastern Slavonic Studies at Jagiellonian University in Cracow, he builds practical AI tools for heritage and low-resource languages. He created the Slovak-to-Rusyn translation engine Rusynator.com, which also supports Lemko in Poland, as well as the world’s first Lemko translation engine. He is currently rolling out a code kit to support revitalization of other low-resource languages in the region.