Challenges of language technologies for the indigenous languages of the Americas

Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 55–69 Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, August 20-26, 2018. 55 Challenges of language technologies for the indigenous languages of the Americas Manuel Mager Instituto de Investigaciones en Matem´aticas Aplicadas y en Sistemas Universidad Nacional Aut´onoma de M´exico mmager@turing.iimas.unam.mx Ximena Gutierrez-Vasques GIL IINGEN Universidad Nacional Aut´onoma de M´exico xim@unam.mx Gerardo Sierra GIL IINGEN Universidad Nacional Aut´onoma de M´exico gsierram@iingen.unam.mx Ivan Meza Instituto de Investigaciones en Matem´aticas Aplicadas y en Sistemas Universidad Nacional Aut´onoma de M´exico ivanvladimir@turing.iimas.unam.mx Abstract Indigenous languages of the American continent are highly diverse. However, they have received little attention from the technological perspective. In this paper, we review the research, the dig- ital resources and the available NLP systems that focus on these languages. We present the main challenges and research questions that arise when distant languages and low-resource scenarios are faced. We would like to encourage NLP research in linguistically rich and diverse areas like the Americas. Title and Abstract in Nahuatl Masehualtlahtoltecnologias ipan Americatlalli In nepapan Americatlalli imacehualtlahtol, inin tlahtolli ahmo quinpiah miac tlahtoltecnolog´ıas (“tecnolog´ıas del lenguaje”). Ipan inin amatl, tictemoah nochin macehualtlahtoltin intequiuh, nochin recursos digitales ihuan nochin tlahtoltecnolog´ıas in ye mochiuhqueh. Cequintin problemas monextiah ihcuac tlahtolli quinpiah tepitzin recursos kenin amoxtli, niman, ohuic quinchihuaz tecnolog´ıa ihuan ohuic quinchihuaz macehualtlahtolmatiliztli. Cenca importante in ocachi ticchihuilizqueh tlahtoltecnolog´ıas macehualtlahtolli, niman tipalehuilizqueh ahmo mopolozqueh inin tlahtolli. 1 Introduction The American continent is linguistically diverse, it comprises many indigenous languages that are nowa- days spoken from North to South America. There is a wide range of linguistic families and they exhibit linguistic phenomena that are different from the most common languages usually studied in Natural Lan- guage Processing (NLP). There are approximately 28 million1 people who self identify as members of an indigenous group (Wagner, 2016) and they speak around 9002 native or indigenous languages. This represents an important cultural and linguistic richness. This richness was captured by the following quote from McQuown (1955) “in one small portion of the area, in Mexico just north of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, one finds a diversity of linguistic type hard to match on an entire continent in the Old World”. In spite of this, few language technologies have been developed for these languages, moreover, many of the indigenous languages spoken in the Americas face a risk of language extinction. The aim of this work is to explore the research in the NLP field for the indigenous languages spoken in the American continent and to encourage research for these languages. We stress the need of developing language resources and NLP tools for these languages and we point out some of the challenges that arise This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. License details: http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. 1Each country has its own methodology and criteria to estimate the amount of speakers. This is the sum of all estimations. 2This number varies depending on the classification criteria used on different studies. 56 when working on this field. Since indigenous languages …

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