Challenges and Perspectives for Innu-Aimun within Indigenous Language Technologies (2022)

Abstract: Innu-Aimun is an Algonquian language spoken in Eastern Canada. It is the language of the Innu, an Indigenous people that now lives for the most part in a dozen communities across Quebec and Labrador. Although it is alive, Innu-Aimun sees important preservation and revitalization challenges and issues. The state of its technology is still nascent, with very few existing applications. This paper proposes a first survey of the available linguistic resources and existing technology for Innu-Aimun. Considering the existing linguistic and textual resources, we argue that developing language technology is feasible and propose first steps towards NLP applications like machine translation. The goal of developing such technologies is first and foremost to help efforts in improving language transmission and cultural safety and preservation for Innu-Aimun speakers, as those are considered urgent and vital issues. Finally, we discuss the importance of close collaboration and consultation with the Innu community in order to ensure that language technologies are developed respectfully and in accordance with that goal.

## introduction in 2016, there were over 70 different indigenous languages in canada, which together cumulated 260,550 speakers foot_0 , for a total country population of 35,151,728 foot_1 . this number of indigenous language speakers shows how light their demographic weight is, considering the length of indigenous people's presence throughout the country. yet this number also hides important disparities between indigenous languages. while cree, spoken in four of the country's provinces, counts over 96,000 speakers, other languages like haida are only spoken by a few hundreds 3 . in this paper, we examine one specific indigenous language, spoken in quebec and labrador, innu-aimun (iso code moe foot_3 , glottolog mont1268 foot_4 ). like the aforementioned languages, its presence in the country's linguistic landscape is fragile, especially compared to the official languages (english and french). while linguistic resources do exist for innu-aimun, the development of its language technology and nlp applications is almost inexistent. our contributions to the current research consist in two main parts: (1) a survey of innu-aimun linguistic resources and technology, followed by (2) discussions and perspectives concerning how to develop innu-aimun language technology and the role it could have for the community. the structure of this paper is described as follows: section 2 describes innu-aimun and its linguistic situation, and surveys the available linguistic resources and technologies. section 3 addresses the question of how innu-aimun language technology should be developed, including the importance of collaboration with the community, examining language-related social issues and discussing what role technology could have to help on these issues. section 4 provides some ideas for short term and longer term developments, focusing on short term development perspectives and how they could be carried out. finally, section 5 concludes this paper and suggests future directions for further research. ## fnqlsdi -multilingual books as per the directives of the social sciences and humanities research council (sshrc) of canada, "whatever the methodologies or perspectives that apply in a given context, researchers who conduct indigenous research, whether they are indigenous or non-indigenous themselves, commit to respectful relationships with all indigenous peoples and communities." 17 indigenous research should as much as possible be done by and for the community. in the case of indigenous language technology development, this takes an even greater significance as such research aims first and foremost to have a concrete positive impact indigenous communities. language technologies must address in their development the needs as well as the concerns of the community they serve. if the developed technologies result in tools intended as applications with end users, evaluation of the technologies by members of the community should be a key component of a collaborative development. in the case of indigenous languages in canada, an example of such an evaluation for a precise language is the one carried by @xcite for a plains cree computer-aided language learning tool (call). 16 truth and reconciliation commission of canada 17 social sciences and humanities research council -definition of terms, indigenous research ## perspectives: innu-aimun and nlp in light of the discussed roles for innu-aimun language technology, we present here our proposed vision for potential technological developments in collaboration with the itum group foot_14 . this vision is divided into two more accessible developments in the short term and two longer term developments. ## conclusion despite substantial challenges ahead, like the limited amount of resources available or the complexity of the language, we consider the development of more advanced innu-aimun technology to be feasible. we also consider such a development to be important, in view of the very real social issues related to innu-aimun. we believe language technologies like machine translation could be useful in the efforts to ensure language transmission and improve cultural safety in services. the first steps we proposed in this article, besides their goal of demonstrating feasibility, will help better understand the difficulties in processing innu-aimun texts and building technological modules like morphological and translation models. this will allow defining further steps towards the longer term goals like intelligent tutors, conversational agents and automatic transcription.