Empowering Oneida Language Revitalization: Development of an Oneida Verb Conjugator

Yanfei Lu, Patrick Littell, Keren Rice


Abstract
In this paper, we present the development of a digital Oneida verb conjugator through using the Gramble framework. This project is a collaborative effort with the Twatati Adult Oneida Language program. Oneida is a polysynthetic North American Indigenous language. Its verb roots can be conjugated with multiple affixes, and long verbal complexes can be used as utterances. Each Oneida affix encodes important grammatical information, and its form often varies based on various factors, such as its position in the utterance and its phonological environment. The distinct morphosyntactic structures complicate acquisition of the language by learners who are native speakers of English. With an alarmingly small number of native speakers of Oneida, supporting and accelerating adult second language leaners’ acquisition process has become a pressing necessity. The Oneida verb conjugator can demonstrate its users the correct conjugations of verbs and can also let learners generate practice materials tailored to their unique learning trajectories. This paper presents the preliminary stages and outcomes of the project and outlines the areas for improvement to be addressed in our subsequent endeavors.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.511
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
5757–5767
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.511
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yanfei Lu, Patrick Littell, and Keren Rice. 2024. Empowering Oneida Language Revitalization: Development of an Oneida Verb Conjugator. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 5757–5767, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Empowering Oneida Language Revitalization: Development of an Oneida Verb Conjugator (Lu et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.511.pdf