@inproceedings{yang-etal-2025-nushurescue,
    title = {{N}{\"u}shu{R}escue: Reviving the Endangered N{\"u}shu Language with {AI}},
    author = "Yang, Ivory  and
      Ma, Weicheng  and
      Vosoughi, Soroush",
    editor = "Rambow, Owen  and
      Wanner, Leo  and
      Apidianaki, Marianna  and
      Al-Khalifa, Hend  and
      Eugenio, Barbara Di  and
      Schockaert, Steven",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
    month = jan,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.coling-main.468/",
    pages = "7020--7034",
    abstract = {The preservation and revitalization of endangered and extinct languages is a meaningful endeavor, conserving cultural heritage while enriching fields like linguistics and anthropology. However, these languages are typically low-resource, making their reconstruction labor-intensive and costly. This challenge is exemplified by N{\"u}shu, a rare script historically used by Yao women in China for self-expression within a patriarchal society. To address this challenge, we introduce N{\"u}shuRescue, an AI-driven framework designed to train large language models (LLMs) on endangered languages with minimal data. N{\"u}shuRescue automates evaluation and expands target corpora to accelerate linguistic revitalization. As a foundational component, we developed NCGold, a 500-sentence N{\"u}shu-Chinese parallel corpus, the first publicly available dataset of its kind. Leveraging GPT-4-Turbo, with no prior exposure to N{\"u}shu and only 35 short examples from NCGold, N{\"u}shuRescue achieved 48.69{\%} translation accuracy on 50 withheld sentences and generated NCSilver, a set of 98 newly translated modern Chinese sentences of varying lengths. In addition, we developed FastText-based and Seq2Seq models to further support research on N{\"u}shu. N{\"u}shuRescue provides a versatile and scalable tool for the revitalization of endangered languages, minimizing the need for extensive human input. All datasets and code have been made publicly available at https://github.com/ivoryayang/NushuRescue.}
}