By Thomas Jilk
Jacqueline (Lina) Brixey’s great-grandfather was the last fluent Choctaw speaker in her family. After his passing, her great-grandmother urged the family to speak English in order to open better opportunities for themselves in what we now call the United States. Today, out of the roughly 200,000 members of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, only an estimated 1,000 speak the language fluently, a trend accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. For Brixey, her family history — and the prospect of eventually losing the Choctaw language altogether — lit a spark for what would become her life’s work.
“Who are we when we don’t have our languages?” Brixey, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, asked. “It’s such an important part of culture and how we see the world.”
Brixey’s interdisciplinary journey through journalism, linguistics, and computer science enables her to conduct innovative work at the intersection of computing, linguistics, and Indigenous cultures. As part of her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, Brixey worked closely with fellow citizens of the Choctaw Nation to create a chatbot, Masheli, designed to help reclaim the Choctaw language for generations to come. “It was never our choice to lose our language, so the act of coming back to it is very meaningful,” she said.
Now, Brixey is stepping into the Anna Julia Cooper Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Information School, a position made possible through the RISE-AI Initiative at UW–Madison, created to support mentorship and student success across diverse backgrounds and pathways.
She was drawn to UW–Madison in part for the foundation of relationships built between the university and Indigenous communities, including through projects like the iSchool’s Tribal Libraries, Archives and Museums (TLAM) Program. “The fact that the university has maintained good, long-term relationships with Tribal nations really impressed me,” Brixey said. During her year-long fellowship, Brixey will continue to explore how computational technologies can be harnessed, in culturally sensitive ways, to help reclaim and revitalize Indigenous languages.
Brixey’s arrival also signifies an expansion of research conducted within the iSchool and the School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences (CDIS), reflecting the importance of creative, interdisciplinary technology-driven research within CDIS and in the current academic landscape. After the fellowship, Brixey will join the iSchool as an assistant professor for the 2026-27 year.
Discovering computational linguistics
After graduating with a bachelor’s in journalism in 2010, Brixey taught English in Spain and France, igniting a passion for language and education. This led her to study linguistics at the University of Texas-El Paso, where she became interested in computational linguistics and saw its vast potential to be applied to Indigenous languages. She dove fully into the emerging field.
During her PhD program at USC, Brixey made a surprising discovery while assisting on a project recording and preserving Holocaust survivors’ testimonies. She had access to the software used to process and answer people’s questions on behalf of Holocaust survivors, even after their deaths, and she wondered whether it could work in other languages. The technology proved easily adaptable to Choctaw. “I was really surprised and delighted that it worked,” she said. “Even though the system was not trained on Choctaw, it was really language-agnostic.”
A chatbot for Choctaw
What began as individual research became a communal effort of information gathering and synthesis. A student in Mississippi, David Sides, volunteered to gather regional language variants, while others contributed family materials. Brixey’s most intensive fieldwork came in Oklahoma with her father as research assistant: “We drove around in Oklahoma for several weeks, recording both fluent speakers and people along the continuum of learning the language.”
The technical choices behind Masheli prioritized cultural sensitivity over technological novelty. Unlike modern large language models that often misrepresent Indigenous languages, Brixey deliberately chose older, more controllable technologies. This approach, developed through extensive consultation with the Choctaw Nation, required using smaller models trained on handpicked examples.
“It was really important to me that whoever interacted with this chatbot, they were going to get accurate information that would help them learn the language,” Brixey said.
Brixey explained that the significance of learning an ancestral language extends beyond the ability to communicate. Research has shown that “learning our language has been correlated with lower rates of suicide, lower rates of alcohol and drug abuse, even lower rates of type 2 diabetes,” she noted. These health benefits underscore how language reclamation can benefit the wellness of entire communities.
“Learning our [ancestral] language has been correlated with lower rates of suicide, lower rates of alcohol and drug abuse, even lower rates of type 2 diabetes.”
Lina Brixey
Expanding the work
At UW–Madison, Brixey hopes to collaborate with other faculty in the iSchool and Language Sciences, as well as with Wisconsin Indigenous communities, building on the university’s existing relationships. “Would another tribe like to have a chatbot for learning their language? Or would another tribe like to have a speech recognizer, or something else entirely?” She emphasized that AI could be a beneficial tool for promoting language revitalization and preservation. She continued: “I like the idea of speaking with the tribes here to see if any of my toolkits line up with the things that they would like to do with their languages.”
Brixey’s work represents an expansion of the fields of computational linguistics and computer science, which have been heavily focused on the English language. “The dominance of the English language in technology is a problem on many levels,” Brixey has written. “Without support for other languages, particularly those that are endangered, centuries of knowledge will be lost.” Fortunately, scholars like her have dedicated their careers to keeping that critical knowledge alive.
Visit Lina Brixey’s personal website.
Learn more about the Anna Julia Cooper Postdoctoral Fellowship.