How can NLP Help Revitalize Endangered Languages? A Case Study and Roadmap for the Cherokee Language
How can NLP Help Revitalize Endangered Languages? A Case Study and Roadmap for the Cherokee Language
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DOI：
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.108
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发表时间：
2022-04
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Shiyue Zhang;B. Frey;Mohit Bansal
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文献类型：
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作者：
Shiyue Zhang;B. Frey;Mohit Bansal
世界上43%以上的语言濒临灭绝，由于全球化和新殖民主义，语言损失目前正在加速发生。拯救和振兴濒危语言对于维护地球上的文化多样性已经变得非常重要。在这项工作中，我们重点讨论NLP如何帮助振兴濒危语言。我们首先提出了三个原则，可以帮助NLP实践者与语言社区建立相互理解和合作，并讨论了NLP可以潜在地帮助语言教育的三个方面。然后，我们以切罗基语为例，切罗基语是一种严重濒危的美国原住民语言。在回顾了这种语言的历史、语言特征和现有资源之后，我们(与切诺基社区成员合作)得出了一些有意义的方式，可以让NLP从业者与社区合作伙伴进行合作。我们建议使用机器在循环处理来丰富切诺基语言资源的两种方法，并讨论切诺基社区的人们表现出兴趣的几个NLP工具。我们希望我们的工作不仅有助于让NLP社区了解切诺基人，还能为未来有关濒危语言的一般工作提供灵感。
More than 43% of the languages spoken in the world are endangered, and language loss currently occurs at an accelerated rate because of globalization and neocolonialism. Saving and revitalizing endangered languages has become very important for maintaining the cultural diversity on our planet. In this work, we focus on discussing how NLP can help revitalize endangered languages. We first suggest three principles that may help NLP practitioners to foster mutual understanding and collaboration with language communities, and we discuss three ways in which NLP can potentially assist in language education. We then take Cherokee, a severely-endangered Native American language, as a case study. After reviewing the language’s history, linguistic features, and existing resources, we (in collaboration with Cherokee community members) arrive at a few meaningful ways NLP practitioners can collaborate with community partners. We suggest two approaches to enrich the Cherokee language’s resources with machine-in-the-loop processing, and discuss several NLP tools that people from the Cherokee community have shown interest in. We hope that our work serves not only to inform the NLP community about Cherokee, but also to provide inspiration for future work on endangered languages in general.