The lack of resources for languages in the Americas has proven to be a problem for the creation of digital systems such as machine translation, search engines, chat bots, and more. The scarceness of digital resources for a language causes a higher impact on populations where the language is spoken by millions of people. We introduce the first official large combined corpus for deep learning of an indigenous South American low-resource language spoken by millions called Quechua. Specifically, our curated corpus is created from text gathered from the southern region of Peru where a dialect of Quechua is spoken that has not traditionally been used for digital systems as a target dialect in the past. In order to make our work repeatable by others, we also offer a public, pre-trained, BERT model called QuBERT which is the largest linguistic model ever trained for any Quechua type, not just the southern region dialect. We furthermore test our corpus and its corresponding BERT model on two major tasks: (1) named-entity recognition (NER) and (2) part-of-speech (POS) tagging by using state-of-the-art techniques where we achieve results comparable to other work on higher-resource languages. In this article, we describe the methodology, challenges, and results from the creation of QuBERT which is on par with other state-of-the-art multilingual models for natural language processing achieving between 71 and 74% F1 score on NER and 84–87% on POS tasks.

The Huqariq corpus is a multilingual collection of speech from native Peruvian languages. The transcribed corpus is intended for the research and development of speech technologies to preserve endangered languages in Peru. Huqariq is primarily designed for the development of automatic speech recognition, language identification and text-to-speech tools. In order to achieve corpus collection sustainably, we employs the crowdsourcing methodology. Huqariq includes four native languages of Peru, and it is expected that by the year 2022, it can reach up to 20 native languages out of the 48 native languages in Peru. The corpus has 220 hours of transcribed audio recorded by more than 500 volunteers, making it the largest speech corpus for native languages in Peru. In order to verify the quality of the corpus, we present speech recognition experiments using 220 hours of fully transcribed audio.

In the effort to minimize the risk of extinction of a language, linguistic resources are fundamental. Quechua, a low-resource language from South America, is a language spoken by millions but, despite several efforts in the past, still lacks the resources necessary to build high-performance computational systems. In this article, we present WordNet-QU which signifies the inclusion of Quechua in a well-known lexical database called wordnet. We propose WordNet-QU to be included as an extension to wordnet after demonstrating a manually-curated collection of multiple digital resources for lexical use in Quechua. Our work uses the synset alignment algorithm to compare Quechua to its geographically nearest high-resource language, Spanish. Altogether, we propose a total of 28,582 unique synset IDs divided according to region like so: 20510 for Southern Quechua, 5993 for Central Quechua, 1121 for Northern Quechua, and 958 for Amazonian Quechua.