Linguistics Colloquium Series: Computational models for St. Lawrence Island Yupik
A Talk by Dr. Lane Schwartz, Assistant Professor Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Past Event
Thursday, April 12, 2018 7:30 PM to 9:00 PM EDT
Merten Hall, #3300
St. Lawrence Island Yupik (ISO 639-3: ess), also known as Chaplinski in the Russian literature, is an endangered language of the Bering Strait region indigenous to St. Lawrence Island in far western Alaska and the Chukchi Peninsula of far eastern Russia. The polysynthetic nature of Yupik morphology makes many traditional computational approaches to modeling language phenomena in Yupik impractical. While a small number of computational resources have been developed for some languages in the Inuit branch of this language family, to our knowledge, no computational tools have previously been developed for St. Lawrence Island Yupik. We present the first such tools for St. Lawrence Island Yupik, and discuss their practical implications for language documentation and revitalization efforts. These tools include a web-based framework that incorporates a basic spell checker and transliteration utilities, including transliteration from the Latin and Cyrillic orthographies to IPA, as well as a separate morphological analyzer built using the foma finite-state toolkit.
