@inproceedings{van-dam-stephen-2026-automated,
    title = "Automated Quality Control for Language Documentation: Detecting Phonotactic Inconsistencies in a Kokborok Wordlist",
    author = "van Dam, Kellen Parker  and
      Stephen, Abishek",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on {NLP} Applications to Field Linguistics",
    month = mar,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Rabat, Morocco",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/manual-author-scripts/2026.fieldmatters-1.1/",
    pages = "1--7",
    abstract = "Lexical data collection in language documentation often contains transcription errors and borrowings that can mislead linguistic analysis. We present unsupervised methods to identify phonotactic inconsistencies in wordlists, applying them to a multilingual dataset of Kokborok varieties with Bangla. Using phoneme-level and syllable-level n-gram language models, our approach identifies potential transcription errors and borrowings. We evaluate our methods using hand annotated gold standard and rank the phonotactic outliers using precision and recall at K metric. The ranking approach provides field linguists with a method to flag entries requiring verification, supporting data quality improvement in low-resourced language documentation."
}