Linguistic Feature Tagging for Automatic Classification of 27 Closely-Related Quechua Varieties

Claire Post, Alexis Palmer


Abstract
This paper presents a multi-dialect text classifier for Quechua that augments neural models with rule-based linguistic information to address challenges in low-resource, morphologically complex settings. The approach is built on a carefully curated dataset spanning multiple genres, including annotated parallel bible corpora, and encodes manually annotated lexical variation and polypersonal verbal agreement as explicit features within a transformer-based classifier. Results show that neural models substantially outperform statistical baselines, enabling highly accurate multi-class classification across 27 Quechua dialects. The impact of linguistic augmentation is context-dependent: gains are minimal in high-resource settings but more pronounced in low-resource and cross-domain conditions. Overall, this work aims to contribute to the development of dialect-sensitive NLP methods for Quechua and other low-resource, morphologically rich languages.
Anthology ID:
2026.americasnlp-6.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on NLP for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, USA
Editors:
Manuel Mager, Abteen Ebrahimi, Minh Duc Bui, Robert Pugh, Arturo Oncevay, Luis Chiruzzo, Rolando Coto Solano, Shruti Rijhwani, Katharina Von Der Wense
Venues:
AmericasNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
46–63
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.americasnlp-6.5/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Claire Post and Alexis Palmer. 2026. Linguistic Feature Tagging for Automatic Classification of 27 Closely-Related Quechua Varieties. In Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on NLP for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP), pages 46–63, San Diego, California, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Linguistic Feature Tagging for Automatic Classification of 27 Closely-Related Quechua Varieties (Post & Palmer, AmericasNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.americasnlp-6.5.pdf