A Practical Tool to Help Automate Interlinear Glossing: a Study on Mukrī Kurdish

Hiwa Asadpour, Shu Okabe, Alexander Fraser


Abstract
Interlinear gloss generation aims to predict linguistic annotations (gloss) for a sentence in a language that is usually under ongoing documentation. Such output is a first draft for the linguist to work with and should reduce the manual workload.This article studies a simple glossing pipeline based on a Conditional Random Field and applies it to a small fieldwork corpus in Mukrī Kurdish, a variety of Central Kurdish.We mainly focus on making the tool as accessible as possible for field linguists, so it can run on standard computers without the need for GPUs. Our pipeline predicts common grammatical patterns robustly and, more generally, frequent combinations of morphemes and glosses. Although more advanced neural models do reach better results, our feature-based system still manages to be competitive and to provide interpretability.To foster further collaboration between field linguistics and NLP, we also provide some recommendations regarding documentation endeavours and release our pipeline code alongside.
Anthology ID:
2025.fieldmatters-1.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on NLP Applications to Field Linguistics
Month:
August
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Éric Le Ferrand, Elena Klyachko, Anna Postnikova, Tatiana Shavrina, Oleg Serikov, Ekaterina Voloshina, Ekaterina Vylomova
Venues:
FieldMatters | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
65–75
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2025-08/2025.fieldmatters-1.6/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hiwa Asadpour, Shu Okabe, and Alexander Fraser. 2025. A Practical Tool to Help Automate Interlinear Glossing: a Study on Mukrī Kurdish. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on NLP Applications to Field Linguistics, pages 65–75, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Practical Tool to Help Automate Interlinear Glossing: a Study on Mukrī Kurdish (Asadpour et al., FieldMatters 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2025-08/2025.fieldmatters-1.6.pdf