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

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a morphologicallyaware 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 et al. (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.

Working Towards Digital Documentation of Uralic Languages With Open-Source Tools and Modern NLP Methods

“…This has been possible using a morphologically aware dictionary. In the system, a strategy of multiple input methods has been intro-duced that caters to different writing systems (Hunt et al, 2019). The work here is tailor-made, and it maintains a strong link between the language and its community.…”

On Editing Dictionaries for Uralic Languages in an Online Environment

“…In this section, we present some of the recent work on online dictionaries, which is heavily guided by the needs of one individual language. Our infrastruc-¹Skolt word for stream A recent dictionary for St. Lawrence Island Yupik (Hunt et al, 2019) combines Foma-based morphological analyzers with an HTML based search interface. Unlike Akusanat, which does the morphological analysis and generation in the cloud, their solution runs the transducers on the client side with Foma's Javascript integration.…”

Open-Source Morphology for Endangered Mordvinic Languages

“…2 Designing for a Reusable API It is not uncommon that similar tools and methods are developed by different research groups in different parts of the world for language documentation purposes. To name a few, there are projects developing similar language documentation systems for African languages (Jones and Muftic, 2020), Indonesian languages (Nasution et al, 2018) and Yupik (Hunt et al, 2019), while at the same time, it has been shown that digital humanities projects that are seemingly different, still face the very same technical problems (Mäkelä et al, 2020). In arguably, any work conducted with endangered languages to document them and better serve the small community of speakers has a lot of value.…”