Theoretical and Practical Issues in the Semantic Annotation of Four Indigenous Languages

Jens E. L. Van Gysel, Meagan Vigus, Lukas Denk, Andrew Cowell, Rosa Vallejos, Tim O’Gorman, William Croft


Abstract
Computational resources such as semantically annotated corpora can play an important role in enabling speakers of indigenous minority languages to participate in government, education, and other domains of public life in their own language. However, many languages – mainly those with small native speaker populations and without written traditions – have little to no digital support. One hurdle in creating such resources is that for many languages, few speakers would be capable of annotating texts – a task which requires literacy and some linguistic training – and that these experts’ time is typically in high demand for language planning work. This paper assesses whether typologically trained non-speakers of an indigenous language can feasibly perform semantic annotation using Uniform Meaning Representations, thus allowing for the creation of computational materials without putting further strain on community resources.
Anthology ID:
2021.law-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the Joint 15th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW) and 3rd Designing Meaning Representations (DMR) Workshop
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Claire Bonial, Nianwen Xue
Venue:
LAW
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12–22
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.law-1.2
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.law-1.2
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jens E. L. Van Gysel, Meagan Vigus, Lukas Denk, Andrew Cowell, Rosa Vallejos, Tim O’Gorman, and William Croft. 2021. Theoretical and Practical Issues in the Semantic Annotation of Four Indigenous Languages. In Proceedings of the Joint 15th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW) and 3rd Designing Meaning Representations (DMR) Workshop, pages 12–22, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Theoretical and Practical Issues in the Semantic Annotation of Four Indigenous Languages (Van Gysel et al., LAW 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.law-1.2.pdf