While developing computational language documentation tools, researchers must center the role of language communities in the process by carefully reflecting on and designing tools to support the varying needs and priorities of different language communities. This paper provides an example of how cross-cultural considerations discussed in literature about language documentation, data sovereignty, and community-led documentation projects can motivate the design of a computational language documentation tool by reflecting on our design process as we work towards developing an annotation and data management tool. We identify three recurring themes for cross-cultural consideration in the literature - Linguistic Sovereignty, Cultural Specificity, and Reciprocity - and present eight essential features for an annotation and data management tool that reflect these themes.

Orthographical standardization is a milestone in a language’s documentation and the development of its resources. However, texts written in former orthographies remain relevant to the language’s history and development and therefore must be converted to the standardized orthography. Ensuring a language has access to the orthographically standardized version of all of its recorded texts is important in the development of resources as it provides additional textual resources for training, supports contribution of authors using former writing systems, and provides information about the development of the language. This paper evaluates the performance of natural language processing methods, specifically Finite State Transducers and Long Short-term Memory networks, for the orthographical conversion of Bàsàá texts from the Protestant missionary orthography to the now-standard AGLC orthography, with the conclusion that LSTMs are somewhat more effective in the absence of explicit lexical information.

This paper presents an extension to the VISL CG-3 compiler and processor which enables complex contexts to be shared between rules. This sharing substantially improves the readability and maintainability of sets of rules performing multi-step operations.

We present a free/open-source morphological transducer for Western Armenian, an endangered and low-resource Indo-European language. The transducer has virtually complete coverage of the language’s inflectional morphology. We built the lexicon by scraping online dictionaries. As of submission, the transducer has a lexicon of 75K words. It has over 90% naive coverage on different Western Armenian corpora, and high precision.

Modeling stress placement has historically been a challenge for computational morphological analysis, especially in finite-state systems because lexically conditioned stress cannot be modeled using only rewrite rules on the phonological form of a word. However, these phenomena can be modeled fairly easily if the lexicon’s internal representation is allowed to contain more information than the pure phonological form. In this paper we describe the stress systems of Ancient Greek and Ancient Hebrew and we present two prototype finite-state morphological analyzers, one for each language, which successfully implement these stress systems by inserting a small number of control characters into the phonological form, thus conclusively refuting the claim that finite-state systems are not powerful enough to model such stress systems and arguing in favor of the continued relevance of finite-state systems as an appropriate tool for modeling the morphology of historical languages.

In this paper we present the initial construction of a Universal Dependencies treebank with morphological annotations of Ancient Hebrew containing portions of the Hebrew Scriptures (1579 sentences, 27K tokens) for use in comparative study with ancient translations and for analysis of the development of Hebrew syntax. We construct this treebank by applying a rule-based parser (300 rules) to an existing morphologically-annotated corpus with minimal constituency structure and manually verifying the output and present the results of this semi-automated annotation process and some of the annotation decisions made in the process of applying the UD guidelines to a new language.