NNA: Collaborative Research: Integrating Language Documentation and Computational Tools for Yupik, an Alaska Native Language

语言如何构建单词的跨语言变异的一个轨迹是，意义是否编码在独立为单词的自由语素（“意义单位”）中，或者这些语素是否必须与其他语素联合收割机组合才能成为单词。虽然英语有许多自由词素，但阿拉斯加土著语言圣劳伦斯岛/西伯利亚尤皮克使用第二种策略来处理非常复杂的单词，通常是小型的。这些特性被称为凝集和多合成。研究人员将记录语言中的关键结构，分析现有的Yupik材料，并建立计算工具来帮助社区和其他研究人员。Yupik的数据对语言科学非常重要，因为语言中显示的许多现象都很罕见，也没有得到很好的理解。为具有非常复杂的单词的语言（如Yupik）创建计算工具对计算机科学家和语言科学家来说是额外的好处，因为它可以帮助研究人员改进英语等语言的计算工具。美国国会于1990年通过的《美洲原住民语言法》承认了美洲原住民语言的独特地位和重要性。这个项目将建立和改进一些工具，如一个形态分析器、一个拼写检查器和一个可搜索的字典，这些工具对社区振兴他们的语言有价值。研究生将接受这些方法的培训，研究人员将与语言社区的高中生举行外联会议，教授他们重要的计算机和编码技能，使他们能够构建更多的工具。所有收集的数据将永久存档在阿拉斯加土著语言档案馆。来自伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校和乔治梅森大学的语言和计算机科学家合作的调查人员将承担这一项目。它包括三个相互关联的部分：将尤皮克现有材料数字化，供社区成员和研究人员使用;记录和分析尤皮克人的讲话;与社区合作为尤皮克制作计算机工具，并教学生如何制作。一个成功的计算模型的Yupik语言现象的无监督和半监督的方法在形态归纳和语法归纳的影响，因为形态音位变化的类型是普遍的，更比其他方法中使用的模型，以无监督形态归纳。这项工作可能有重要的影响，适当的计算建模的多合成凝集morphosyntax。在几个档案馆收集材料，该团队将扫描它们，清理和处理扫描，使它们可以数字化和搜索。这将创建一个Yupik材料的数字语料库，供社区使用，并用于语法语气，时态和方面的语言调查，以更好地理解这些复杂的形态语义结构。这些数据还将改善该项目正在开发的计算工具，为Yupik社区提供现代工具，如拼写检查器，电子搜索词典和电子书籍。最后，在其紧密结合的实地工作和计算工具的开发语言的分析，这个项目将作为一个模型，为未来的合作，这类。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得的支持，通过评估使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准。

One locus of crosslinguistic variation in how languages build words is whether meaning is encoded in free morphemes ('units of meaning') that stand alone as words, or whether those morphemes must combine with other morphemes to become words. While English has many free morphemes, the Alaska Native language St. Lawrence Island/Siberian Yupik uses the second strategy with very complex words, often sentence-sized. These properties are known as agglutination and polysynthesis. Researchers will document critical structures in the language, digitize existing Yupik materials, and build computational tools to help the community and other researchers. The data from Yupik are extremely important to language science, since many of the phenomena displayed in the language are rare and not well understood. Creating computational tools for languages with very complex words, like Yupik, is of additional benefit to computer scientists and language scientists in that it helps researchers improve computational tools for languages like English. The Native American Languages Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1990, enacted into policy the recognition of the unique status and importance of Native American languages. This project will build and improve tools like a morphological analyzer, a spellchecker, and a searchable dictionary, of value to the community in revitalizing their language. Graduate students will be trained in these methods, and researchers will hold outreach meetings with high school students in the language community to teach them important computer and coding skills that will enable them to build further tools. All data gathered will be permanently archived at the Alaska Native Language Archive.The investigators, a collaboration of language and computer scientists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and George Mason University, will undertake this project. It involves three interconnected parts: digitization of existing materials on and in Yupik for use by community members and researchers; recording and analyzing the speech of Yupik speakers; and working with the community to build computer tools for Yupik and teaching students how to do so. A successful computational model of Yupik linguistic phenomena has implications for unsupervised and semi-supervised methods in morphology induction and grammar induction because the types of morphophonological change are pervasive, much more so than models used in other approaches to unsupervised morphology induction. This work is likely to have important implications regarding appropriate computational modeling of polysynthetic agglutinative morphosyntax. Accessing materials at several archives, the team will scan them, and clean and process the scans so they are accessible digitally and searchable. This will create a digital corpus of Yupik materials for use by the community and for linguistic investigations into grammatical mood, tense, and aspect to better understand these complex morphosemantic constructions. The data will also improve the computational tools being developed in this project, providing the Yupik community with access to modern tools like spellcheckers, electronically searchable dictionaries, and electronic books. Finally, in its tight integration of field work and the development of computational tools for the analysis of the language, this project will serve as a model for future collaborations of this kind.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.