Community lexical access for an endangered polysynthetic language: An electronic dictionary for St. Lawrence Island Yupik

Benjamin Hunt, Emily Chen, Sylvia L.R. Schreiner, Lane Schwartz


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
N19-4021
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Demonstrations)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Waleed Ammar, Annie Louis, Nasrin Mostafazadeh
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
122–126
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-4021
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-4021
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Benjamin Hunt, Emily Chen, Sylvia L.R. Schreiner, and Lane Schwartz. 2019. Community lexical access for an endangered polysynthetic language: An electronic dictionary for St. Lawrence Island Yupik. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Demonstrations), pages 122–126, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Community lexical access for an endangered polysynthetic language: An electronic dictionary for St. Lawrence Island Yupik (Hunt et al., NAACL 2019)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/N19-4021.pdf