Julia Mainzinger


2024

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Technology and Language Revitalization: A Roadmap for the Mvskoke Language
Julia Mainzinger
Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages

This paper is a discussion of how NLP can come alongside community efforts to aid in revitalizing the Mvskoke language. Mvskoke is a language indigenous to the southeastern United States that has seen an increase in language revitalization efforts in the last few years. This paper presents an overview of available resources in Mvskoke, an exploration of relevant NLP tasks and related work in endangered language contexts, and applications to language revitalization.

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Fine-Tuning ASR models for Very Low-Resource Languages: A Study on Mvskoke
Julia Mainzinger | Gina-Anne Levow
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)

Recent advancements in multilingual models for automatic speech recognition (ASR) have been able to achieve a high accuracy for languages with extremely limited resources. This study examines ASR modeling for the Mvskoke language, an indigenous language of America. The parameter efficiency of adapter training is contrasted with training entire models, and it is demonstrated how performance varies with different amounts of data. Additionally, the models are evaluated with trigram language model decoding, and the outputs are compared across different types of speech recordings. Results show that training an adapter is both parameter efficient and gives higher accuracy for a relatively small amount of data.