Anuk Centellas
2026
Bridging Digital Tools for Linguistic Documentation and Revitalization
Christopher Haberland | Carly Crowther | Jingnong Qu | Anuk Centellas
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on NLP for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP)
Christopher Haberland | Carly Crowther | Jingnong Qu | Anuk Centellas
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on NLP for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP)
Digital tools serving language revitalization tend to fall into two categories: 1) linguist-oriented documentation tools that prioritize annotation, morphological analysis, and archival preservation, and 2) community-facing applications that emphasize accessibility and language learning. Few systems integrate the former with the latter, and practical barriers — including the cost of computational expertise, single-user workflows, and limited data governance — further constrain their utility. These disconnects incur additional development and communication costs for revitalization teams consisting of linguists and community members. We introduce "langlit", a collaborative web-based platform that attempts to tailor documentation workflows for the language revitalization context within a single system. The platform integrates a finite-state morphological analyzer with a three-tier human-in-the-loop annotation workflow, searchable corpus interfaces with multiple query modalities, interactive word construction guided by the morphological grammar, corpus-linked hypothesis tracking with provenance, and a grammar-derived editable dictionary. All components share a single underlying FST grammar, and the system supports configurable access controls, collaborative editing, and optional LLM integration with transparent data handling. Designed for redeployment across languages through a modular architecture, "langlit" is published as an open-source repository on GitHub. We situate our system within the existing landscape of revitalization tools through a comparative analysis and discuss how integrated, community-informed design can better serve the specific goals of language revitalization.