Mi'kmaq is a polysynthetic Indigenous language spoken primarily in Eastern Canada, on which no prior computational work has focused. In this paper we first construct and analyze a web corpus of Mi'kmaq. We then evaluate several approaches to language modelling for Mi'kmaq, including character-level models that are particularly well-suited to morphologically-rich languages. Preservation of Indigenous languages is particularly important in the current Canadian context; we argue that natural language processing could aid such efforts.
@InProceedings{MAHESHWARI18.372, author = {Anant Maheshwari and Leo Bouscarrat and Paul Cook}, title = "{Towards Language Technology for Mi'kmaq}", booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {May 7-12, 2018}, address = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference chair) and Khalid Choukri and Christopher Cieri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Koiti Hasida and Hitoshi Isahara and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Hélène Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis and Takenobu Tokunaga}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, isbn = {979-10-95546-00-9}, language = {english} }
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