Cynthia Montaño


2020

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CPLM, a Parallel Corpus for Mexican Languages: Development and Interface
Gerardo Sierra Martínez | Cynthia Montaño | Gemma Bel-Enguix | Diego Córdova | Margarita Mota Montoya
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Mexico is a Spanish speaking country that has a great language diversity, with 68 linguistic groups and 364 varieties. As they face a lack of representation in education, government, public services and media, they present high levels of endangerment. Due to the lack of data available on social media and the internet, few technologies have been developed for these languages. To analyze different linguistic phenomena in the country, the Language Engineering Group developed the Corpus Paralelo de Lenguas Mexicanas (CPLM) [The Mexican Languages Parallel Corpus], a collaborative parallel corpus for the low-resourced languages of Mexico. The CPLM aligns Spanish with six indigenous languages: Maya, Ch’ol, Mazatec, Mixtec, Otomi, and Nahuatl. First, this paper describes the process of building the CPLM: text searching, digitalization and alignment process. Furthermore, we present some difficulties regarding dialectal and orthographic variations. Second, we present the interface and types of searching as well as the use of filters.

2019


A Parallel Corpus Mixtec-Spanish
Cynthia Montaño | Gerardo Sierra Martínez | Gemma Bel-Enguix | Helena Gomez
Proceedings of the 2019 Workshop on Widening NLP

This work is about the compilation process of parallel documents Spanish-Mixtec. There are not many Spanish-Mixec parallel texts and most of the sources are non-digital books. Due to this, we need to face the errors when digitizing the sources and difficulties in sentence alignment, as well as the fact that does not exist a standard orthography. Our parallel corpus consists of sixty texts coming from books and digital repositories. These documents belong to different domains: history, traditional stories, didactic material, recipes, ethnographical descriptions of each town and instruction manuals for disease prevention. We have classified this material in five major categories: didactic (6 texts), educative (6 texts), interpretative (7 texts), narrative (39 texts), and poetic (2 texts). The final total of tokens is 49,814 Spanish words and 47,774 Mixtec words. The texts belong to the states of Oaxaca (48 texts), Guerrero (9 texts) and Puebla (3 texts). According to this data, we see that the corpus is unbalanced in what refers to the representation of the different territories. While 55% of speakers are in Oaxaca, 80% of texts come from this region. Guerrero has the 30% of speakers and the 15% of texts and Puebla, with the 15% of the speakers has a representation of the 5% in the corpus.