@inproceedings{eggleston-etal-2025-bridging,
    title = "Bridging the Gap: Leveraging {C}herokee to Improve Language Identification for Endangered {I}roquoian Languages",
    author = "Eggleston, Liam Enzo  and
      Cacioli, Michael P.  and
      Sarabu, Jatin  and
      Yang, Ivory  and
      Zhu, Kevin",
    editor = "Estevanell-Valladares, Ernesto Luis  and
      Picazo-Izquierdo, Alicia  and
      Ranasinghe, Tharindu  and
      Mikaberidze, Besik  and
      Ostermann, Simon  and
      Gurgurov, Daniil  and
      Mueller, Philipp  and
      Borg, Claudia  and
      {\v{S}}imko, Mari{\'a}n",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the First Workshop on Advancing NLP for Low-Resource Languages",
    month = sep,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Varna, Bulgaria",
    publisher = "INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2026-01/2025.lowresnlp-1.1/",
    pages = "1--6",
    abstract = "Language identification is a foundational task in natural language processing (NLP), yet many Indigenous languages remain entirely unsupported by commercial language identification systems. In this study, we assess the performance of Google LangID on a 5k Cherokee dataset and find that every sentence is classified as ``undetermined'', indicating a complete failure to even misidentify Cherokee as another language. To further explore this issue, we manually constructed the first digitalized Northern Iroquoian dataset, consisting of 120 sentences across five related languages: Onondaga, Cayuga, Mohawk, Seneca, and Oneida. Running these sentences through Google LangID, we examine patterns in its incorrect predictions. To address these limitations, we train a random forest classifier to successfully distinguish between these languages, demonstrating its effectiveness in language identification. Our findings underscore the inadequacies of existing commercial language identification models for Indigenous languages and highlight concrete steps toward improving automated recognition of low-resource languages."
}