Sylvia L.R. Schreiner
2019
Bootstrapping a Neural Morphological Analyzer for St. Lawrence Island Yupik from a Finite-State Transducer
Lane Schwartz
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Emily Chen
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Benjamin Hunt
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Sylvia L.R. Schreiner
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages Volume 1 (Papers)
Community lexical access for an endangered polysynthetic language: An electronic dictionary for St. Lawrence Island Yupik
Benjamin Hunt
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Emily Chen
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Sylvia L.R. Schreiner
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Lane Schwartz
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Demonstrations)
In this paper, we introduce a morphologically-aware electronic dictionary for St. Lawrence Island Yupik, an endangered language of the Bering Strait region. Implemented using HTML, Javascript, and CSS, the dictionary is set in an uncluttered interface and permits users to search in Yupik or in English for Yupik root words and Yupik derivational suffixes. For each matching result, our electronic dictionary presents the user with the corresponding entry from the Badten (2008) Yupik-English paper dictionary. Because Yupik is a polysynthetic language, handling of multimorphemic word forms is critical. If a user searches for an inflected Yupik word form, we perform a morphological analysis and return entries for the root word and for any derivational suffixes present in the word. This electronic dictionary should serve not only as a valuable resource for all students and speakers of Yupik, but also for field linguists working towards documentation and conservation of the language.
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