In this work, we present the results of the AmericasNLP 2023 Shared Task on Machine Translation into Indigenous Languages of the Americas. This edition of the shared task featured eleven language pairs, one of which – Chatino-Spanish – uses a newly collected evaluation dataset, consisting of professionally translated text from the legal domain. Seven teams participated in the shared task, with a total of 181 submissions. Additionally, we conduct a human evaluation of the best system outputs, and compare them to the best submissions from the prior shared task. We find that this analysis agrees with the quantitative measures used to rank submissions, which shows further improvements of 9.64 ChrF on average across all languages, when compared to the prior winning system.

The Universal Morphology (UniMorph) project is a collaborative effort providing broad-coverage instantiated normalized morphological inflection tables for hundreds of diverse world languages. The project comprises two major thrusts: a language-independent feature schema for rich morphological annotation, and a type-level resource of annotated data in diverse languages realizing that schema. This paper presents the expansions and improvements on several fronts that were made in the last couple of years (since McCarthy et al. (2020)). Collaborative efforts by numerous linguists have added 66 new languages, including 24 endangered languages. We have implemented several improvements to the extraction pipeline to tackle some issues, e.g., missing gender and macrons information. We have amended the schema to use a hierarchical structure that is needed for morphological phenomena like multiple-argument agreement and case stacking, while adding some missing morphological features to make the schema more inclusive. In light of the last UniMorph release, we also augmented the database with morpheme segmentation for 16 languages. Lastly, this new release makes a push towards inclusion of derivational morphology in UniMorph by enriching the data and annotation schema with instances representing derivational processes from MorphyNet.

Despite recent advances in natural language processing and other language technology, the application of such technology to language documentation and conservation has been limited. In August 2019, a workshop was held at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, USA to attempt to bring together language community members, documentary linguists, and technologists to discuss how to bridge this gap and create prototypes of novel and practical language revitalization technologies. The workshop focused on developing technologies to aid language documentation and revitalization in four areas: 1) spoken language (speech transcription, phone to orthography decoding, text-to-speech and text-speech forced alignment), 2) dictionary extraction and management, 3) search tools for corpora, and 4) social media (language learning bots and social media analysis). This paper reports the results of this workshop, including issues discussed, and various conceived and implemented technologies for nine languages: Arapaho, Cayuga, Inuktitut, Irish Gaelic, Kidaw’ida, Kwak’wala, Ojibwe, San Juan Quiahije Chatino, and Seneca.

A broad goal in natural language processing (NLP) is to develop a system that has the capacity to process any natural language. Most systems, however, are developed using data from just one language such as English. The SIGMORPHON 2020 shared task on morphological reinflection aims to investigate systems’ ability to generalize across typologically distinct languages, many of which are low resource. Systems were developed using data from 45 languages and just 5 language families, fine-tuned with data from an additional 45 languages and 10 language families (13 in total), and evaluated on all 90 languages. A total of 22 systems (19 neural) from 10 teams were submitted to the task. All four winning systems were neural (two monolingual transformers and two massively multilingual RNN-based models with gated attention). Most teams demonstrate utility of data hallucination and augmentation, ensembles, and multilingual training for low-resource languages. Non-neural learners and manually designed grammars showed competitive and even superior performance on some languages (such as Ingrian, Tajik, Tagalog, Zarma, Lingala), especially with very limited data. Some language families (Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo, Turkic) were relatively easy for most systems and achieved over 90% mean accuracy while others were more challenging.

This tutorial will focus on NLP for endangered languages documentation and revitalization. First, we will acquaint the attendees with the process and the challenges of language documentation, showing how the needs of the language communities and the documentary linguists map to specific NLP tasks. We will then present the state-of-the-art in NLP applied in this particularly challenging setting (extremely low-resource datasets, noisy transcriptions, limited annotations, non-standard orthographies). In doing so, we will also analyze the challenges of working in this domain and expand on both the capabilities and the limitations of current NLP approaches. Our ultimate goal is to motivate more NLP practitioners to work towards this very important direction, and also provide them with the tools and understanding of the limitations/challenges, both of which are needed in order to have an impact.

We present the first resource focusing on the verbal inflectional morphology of San Juan Quiahije Chatino, a tonal mesoamerican language spoken in Mexico. We provide a collection of complete inflection tables of 198 lemmata, with morphological tags based on the UniMorph schema. We also provide baseline results on three core NLP tasks: morphological analysis, lemmatization, and morphological inflection.

This project approaches the problem of language documentation and revitalization from a rather untraditional angle. To improve and facilitate language documentation of endangered languages, we attempt to use corpus linguistic methods and speech and language technologies to reduce the time needed for transcription and annotation of audio and video language recordings. The paper demonstrates this approach on the example of the endangered and seriously under-resourced variety of Eastern Chatino (CTP). We show how initial speech corpora can be created that can facilitate the development of speech and language technologies for under-resourced languages by utilizing Forced Alignment tools to time align transcriptions. Time-aligned transcriptions can be used to train speech corpora and utilize automatic speech recognition tools for the transcription and annotation of untranscribed data. Speech technologies can be used to reduce the time and effort necessary for transcription and annotation of large collections of audio and video recordings in digital language archives, addressing the transcription bottleneck problem that most language archives and many under-documented languages are confronted with. This approach can increase the availability of language resources from low-resourced and endangered languages to speech and language technology research and development.