In this paper, we describe a computational model of Upper Tanana, a highly endangered Dene (Athabaskan) language spoken in eastern interior Alaska (USA) and in the Yukon Territory (Canada). This model not only parses and generates Upper Tanana verb forms, but uses the language's verb theme category system, a system of lexical-inflectional verb classes, to additionally predict possible derivations and their morphological behavior. This allows us to model a large portion of the Upper Tanana verb lexicon, making it more accessible to learners and scholars alike. Generated derivations will be compared against the narrative corpus of the language as well to the (much more comprehensive) lexical documentation of closely related languages.
@InProceedings{LOVICK18.816, author = {Olga Lovick and Christopher Cox and Miikka Silfverberg and Antti Arppe and Mans Hulden}, title = "{A Computational Architecture for the Morphology of Upper Tanana}", 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} }