Development of a Guarani - Spanish Parallel Corpus

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 2629–2633 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 2629 Development of a Guarani - Spanish Parallel Corpus Luis Chiruzzo1, Pedro Amarilla2, Adolfo R´ıos2, Gustavo Gim´enez Lugo3 1Universidad de la Rep´ublica, Montevideo, Uruguay 2Universidad Nacional de Asunci´on, San Lorenzo, Paraguay 3Universidade Tecnol´ogica Federal do Paran´a, Curitiba, PR - Brasil luischir@fing.edu.uy, pj.amarilla@gmail.com, adolforinu@gmail.com, gustavo@dainf.ct.utfpr.edu.br Abstract This paper presents the development of a Guarani - Spanish parallel corpus with sentence-level alignment. The Guarani sentences of the corpus use the Jopara Guarani dialect, the dialect of Guarani spoken in Paraguay, which is based on Guarani grammar and may include several Spanish loanwords or neologisms. The corpus has around 14,500 sentence pairs aligned using a semi-automatic process, containing 228,000 Guarani tokens and 336,000 Spanish tokens extracted from web sources. Keywords: Guarani, Spanish, parallel corpus 1. Introduction Despite being widely spoken in many regions of South America, with estimates of between 5 and 12 million speak- ers, Guarani is an under-resourced language in the Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics com- munities. The aim of this work is to present a parallel corpus of Guarani and Spanish with sentence-level align- ment. In this work we focus on the Paraguayan dialect of Guarani, called Jopara, which is the widest spoken dialect of Guarani. The corpus contains text extracted from differ- ent web sources; we describe the extraction, alignment and evaluation processes. As stated in the declaration of the 2019 International Year of Indigenous Languages by the United Nations1, language is a core component of human rights and fundamental freedoms. Focusing on languages that are less resourced and under-represented in the Natural Language Processing community could foster interest in the development of tools for these languages that might help making the lives of their speakers better by narrowing the digital divide. Because of this, we consider generating linguistic tools for less re- sourced languages such as Guarani is of the utmost impor- tance. The rest of the document is structured as follows: Section 2 gives a brief introduction of the Guarani language, par- ticularly the Paraguayan dialect; Section 3 discusses some prior linguistic resources and work in the area that exist for Guarani; Section 4 presents the extraction and alignment methods used for building the corpus; Section 5 shows the results of the corpus evaluation; and Section 6 gives some final conclusions and future work. 2. Guarani and Jopara Guarani is a language of the Tupi-Guarani family spo- ken by the Guarani people, a group of indigenous peo- ple from South America. Unlike other indigenous lan- guages, Guarani did not disappear during the colonization period, and nowadays it is spoken by indigenous and non- indigenous people from several countries in South Amer- 1https://en.iyil2019.org/ ica. It is an official language in Paraguay and also in some territories of Argentina and Bolivia. Guarani can be classified as an agglutinative polysynthetic language (Estigarribia and Pinta, 2017; Lustig, 2010), where the words are …

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