Universal dependencies (UD) is a framework for morphosyntactic annotation of human language, which to date has been used to create treebanks for more than 100 languages. In this article, we outline the linguistic theory of the UD framework, which draws on a long tradition of typologically oriented grammatical theories. Grammatical relations between words are centrally used to explain how predicate–argument structures are encoded morphosyntactically in different languages while morphological features and part-of-speech classes give the properties of words. We argue that this theory is a good basis for cross-linguistically consistent annotation of typologically diverse languages in a way that supports computational natural language understanding as well as broader linguistic studies.

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Intelligent computer assisted language learning (ICALL) applications for Indigenous languages are a relatively new avenue for computer assisted language learning (CALL). CALL allows language learners to practise a wide range of grammatical exercises and receive feedback on their answers outside of class time. ICALL is essential for dynamically producing these exercises for polysynthetic Indigenous languages with complex morphology. To better understand user perceptions and behaviours within an ICALL setting, an in-depth user evaluation of nêhiyawêtân (a university-level ICALL application for Plains Cree) was initiated. Five second language learners of Plains Cree were recorded using nêhiyawêtân as they completed various grammatical exercises. They were encouraged to report their opinions, thoughts, and observations aloud. Subsequently, observed user reactions and strategies were recorded. This supplied us with potential user errors, strategies, and preferences that allowed us to improve answer feedback and the design and interface of the exercise templates. Moreover, the results of surveys and observations highlighted sociocultural issues that are not seen in mainstream CALL for majority languages. We hope that this evaluation will serve as a guideline for evaluating future ICALL programs for Indigenous and other minority languages.

The paper describes a rule-based machine translation (MT) system from North to South Saami. The system is designed for a workflow where N orth S aami functions as pivot language in translation from Norwegian or Swedish. We envisage manual translation from Norwegian or Swedish to North Saami, and thereafter MT to South Saami. The system was aimed at a single domain, that of texts for use in school administration. We evaluated the system in terms of the quality of translations for postediting. Two out of three of the Norwegian to South Saami professional translators found the output of the system to be useful. The evaluation shows that it is possible to make a functioning rule-based system with a small transfer lexicon and a small number of rules and achieve results that are useful for a restricted domain, even if there are substantial differences b etween t he languages.

The article presents a rule-based machine translation system from Northern Sami to Norwegian. The grammatical analysis is done with Giellatekno and Divvun's North Sami program for analysis and translation. We have written the transfer component (transfer lexicon and grammatical rules) within the framework of the open machine translation system Apertium. The article contains an evaluation of translated text for two different domains. The translated texts score better on the presentation of the content than on fluent language. By classifying the errors into lexical, grammatical and pragmatic errors, we show that lexical errors are the most harmful for text comprehension. The other two types of errors give a poor language quality, but they have little effect on comprehension. The type of error that is the easiest to correct is the lexical, which is a promising conclusion for the development of a machine translation system for text comprehension.