Brook Lillehaugen


2021

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Towards a morphological transducer and orthography converter for Western Tlacolula Valley Zapotec
Jonathan Washington | Felipe Lopez | Brook Lillehaugen
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas

This paper presents work towards a morphological transducer and orthography converter for Dizhsa, or San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec, an endangered Western Tlacolula Valley Zapotec language. The implementation of various aspects of the language’s morphology is presented, as well as the transducer’s ability to perform analysis in two orthographies and convert between them. Potential uses of the transducer for language maintenance and issues of licensing are also discussed. Evaluation of the transducer shows that it is fairly robust although incomplete, and evaluation of orthographic conversion shows that this method is strongly affected by the coverage of the transducer.