NüshuRescue: Reviving the Endangered Nüshu Language with AI

Ivory Yang, Weicheng Ma, Soroush Vosoughi


Abstract
The preservation and revitalization of endangered and extinct languages is a meaningful endeavor, conserving cultural heritage while enriching fields like linguistics and anthropology. However, these languages are typically low-resource, making their reconstruction labor-intensive and costly. This challenge is exemplified by Nüshu, a rare script historically used by Yao women in China for self-expression within a patriarchal society. To address this challenge, we introduce NüshuRescue, an AI-driven framework designed to train large language models (LLMs) on endangered languages with minimal data. NüshuRescue automates evaluation and expands target corpora to accelerate linguistic revitalization. As a foundational component, we developed NCGold, a 500-sentence Nüshu-Chinese parallel corpus, the first publicly available dataset of its kind. Leveraging GPT-4-Turbo, with no prior exposure to Nüshu and only 35 short examples from NCGold, NüshuRescue achieved 48.69% translation accuracy on 50 withheld sentences and generated NCSilver, a set of 98 newly translated modern Chinese sentences of varying lengths. In addition, we developed FastText-based and Seq2Seq models to further support research on Nüshu. NüshuRescue provides a versatile and scalable tool for the revitalization of endangered languages, minimizing the need for extensive human input. All datasets and code have been made publicly available at https://github.com/ivoryayang/NushuRescue.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.468
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7020–7034
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.468/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ivory Yang, Weicheng Ma, and Soroush Vosoughi. 2025. NüshuRescue: Reviving the Endangered Nüshu Language with AI. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 7020–7034, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NüshuRescue: Reviving the Endangered Nüshu Language with AI (Yang et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.468.pdf