Kalvin Hartwig


2023

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Identification of Dialect for Eastern and Southwestern Ojibwe Words Using a Small Corpus
Kalvin Hartwig | Evan Lucas | Timothy Havens
Proceedings of the Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP)

The Ojibwe language has several dialects that vary to some degree in both spoken and written form. We present a method of using support vector machines to classify two different dialects (Eastern and Southwestern Ojibwe) using a very small corpus of text. Classification accuracy at the sentence level is 90% across a five-fold cross validation and 72% when the sentence-trained model is applied to a data set of individual words. Our code and the word level data set are released openly on Github at [link to be inserted for final version, working demonstration notebook uploaded with paper].