This study addresses the widening gap in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) research between high resource and extremely low resource languages, with a particular focus on Manchu, a severely endangered language. Manchu exemplifies the challenges faced by marginalized linguistic communities in accessing state-of-the-art technologies. In a pioneering effort, we introduce the first-ever Manchu ASR model ManWav, leveraging Wav2Vec2-XLSR-53. The results of the first Manchu ASR is promising, especially when trained with our augmented data. Wav2Vec2-XLSR-53 fine-tuned with augmented data demonstrates a 0.02 drop in CER and 0.13 drop in WER compared to the same base model fine-tuned with original data.

We present pioneering research in the realm of Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the endangered Manchu language. Recognizing the critical importance of linguistic preservation, we experiment with three language models – BiLSTM-CRF, BERT, and mBERT – for Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging tasks. Given the limited digitized Manchu text available, we augment the data using GloVe embeddings for the pre-training of BERT-based models. Remarkably, all models demonstrated outstanding performance, achieving over 90% F1 score in both NER and POS tagging tasks. Our research not only marks the first application of NLP on Manchu and the inaugural use of BERT-based models for the language but also stands as the first endeavor to employ Manchu for NER and POS tagging. To foster further exploration and applications in the field, we make our fine-tuning dataset and models available to the public. Through this research, we aim to underscore the significance of NLP in the protection and revitalization of low-resource languages.

User-generated texts include various types of stylistic properties, or noises. Such texts are not properly processed by existing morpheme analyzers or language models based on formal texts such as encyclopedias or news articles. In this paper, we propose a simple morphologically tight-fitting tokenizer (K-MT) that can better process proper nouns, coinages, and internet slang among other types of noise in Korean user-generated texts. We tested our tokenizer by performing classification tasks on Korean user-generated movie reviews and hate speech datasets, and the Korean Named Entity Recognition dataset. Through our tests, we found that K-MT is better fit to process internet slangs, proper nouns, and coinages, compared to a morpheme analyzer and a character-level WordPiece tokenizer.