@inproceedings{alvarez-c-etal-2025-advancing,
    title = "Advancing Uto-Aztecan Language Technologies: A Case Study on the Endangered {C}omanche Language",
    author = "Alvarez C, Jesus  and
      Karajeanes, Daua  and
      Prado, Ashley  and
      Ruttan, John  and
      Yang, Ivory  and
      O{'}brien, Sean  and
      Sharma, Vasu  and
      Zhu, Kevin",
    editor = "Mager, Manuel  and
      Ebrahimi, Abteen  and
      Pugh, Robert  and
      Rijhwani, Shruti  and
      Von Der Wense, Katharina  and
      Chiruzzo, Luis  and
      Coto-Solano, Rolando  and
      Oncevay, Arturo",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on NLP for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP)",
    month = may,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.americasnlp-1.4/",
    pages = "27--37",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-236-7",
    abstract = "The digital exclusion of endangered languages remains a critical challenge in NLP, limiting both linguistic research and revitalization efforts. This study introduces the first computational investigation of Comanche, an Uto-Aztecan language on the verge of extinction, demonstrating how minimal-cost, community-informed NLP interventions can support language preservation. We present a manually curated dataset of 412 phrases, a synthetic data generation pipeline, and an empirical evaluation of GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini for language identification. Our experiments reveal that while LLMs struggle with Comanche in zero-shot settings, few-shot prompting significantly improves performance, achieving near-perfect accuracy with just five examples. Our findings highlight the potential of targeted NLP methodologies in low-resource contexts and emphasize that visibility is the first step toward inclusion. By establishing a foundation for Comanche in NLP, we advocate for computational approaches that prioritize accessibility, cultural sensitivity, and community engagement."
}