A Digital Corpus of St. Lawrence Island Yupik

• Published in: Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Methods for Endangered Languages
• Main Authors: Schwartz, Lane, Chen, Emily M., Park, Hyunji Hayley, Jahn, Edward, Schreiner, Sylvia L.R.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Methods for Endangered Languages 2021
• Subjects: Lawrence Island; Chukotka; inuit; Inuit–Yupik; St Lawrence Island; St. Lawrence Island Yupik; Yupik; Alaska
• Online Access: https://journals.colorado.edu/index.php/computel/article/view/985; https://doi.org/10.33011/computel.v2i.985

St. Lawrence Island Yupik (ISO 639-3: ess) is an endangered polysynthetic language in the Inuit-Yupik language family indigenous to Alaska and Chukotka. This work presents a step-by-step pipeline for the digitization of written texts, and the first publicly available digital corpus for St. Lawrence Island Yupik, created using that pipeline. This corpus has great potential for future linguistic inquiry and research in NLP. It was also developed for use in Yupik language education and revitalization, with a primary goal of enabling easy access to Yupik texts by educators and by members of the Yupik community. A secondary goal is to support development of language technology such as spell-checkers, text- completion systems, interactive e-books, and language learning apps for use by the Yupik community.