The Indigenous Languages Technology project at NRC C anada: An empowerment-oriented approach to developing language software (2020)

Abstract: This paper surveys the first, three-year phase of a project at the National Research Council of Canada that is developing software to assist Indigenous communities in Canada in preserving their languages and extending their use. The project aimed to work within the empowerment paradigm, where collaboration with communities and fulfillment of their goals is central. Since many of the technologies we developed were in response to community needs, the project ended up as a collection of diverse subprojects, including the creation of a sophisticated framework for building verb conjugators for highly inflectional polysynthetic languages (such as Kanyen’kéha, in the Iroquoian language family), release of what is probably the largest available corpus of sentences in a polysynthetic language (Inuktut) aligned with English sentences and experiments with machine translation (MT) systems trained on this corpus, free online services based on automatic speech recognition (ASR) for easing the transcription bottleneck for recordings of speech in Indigenous languages (and other languages), software for implementing text prediction and read-along audiobooks for Indigenous languages, and several other subprojects.

## introduction this paper describes the indigenous languages technology (ilt) project at the national research council of canada (nrc). phase i of this project received funding of $6 million over three years in the march 2017 budget of the government of canada; phase ii is ongoing. the project's goal is to produce software that will enhance the efforts of indigenous communities in canada to preserve and revitalize their languages. @xcite surveys many different efforts by a variety of organizations that have the same goal. this paper depicts a tiny corner of a big canvas; for space reasons, it does not even cover all aspects of our project. for a detailed technical report on the entire ilt project, see @xcite . different communities have very different linguistic needs, so the ilt project was made up of a diverse set of subprojects. because there is relatively little textual or speech data for indigenous languages in canada (with the partial exception of inuktut), most of the technologies developed within the project described here have been rule-based, rather than relying on data-driven machine learning. different approaches have been taken to linguistic research involving indigenous languages @xcite . most of the work carried out within this project aims to fit into the "empowerment" approach, in which research is carried out collaboratively, with equal emphasis on the agenda of the linguist and of the community. the most ambitious subproject described here was suggested to the nrc team by an indigenous educator: the creation of a verb conjugator for kanyen'kéha (mohawk) (which inspired the creation of a software framework for building verb conjugators for other languages). similarly, the "readalong" subproject for automating word-speech alignment for audio books was in response to strong interest from several communities. the project was guided by an advisory committee made up of indigenous language revitalization experts. their counsel has been invaluable; they are listed at the end of the project web page foot_0 and in the acknowledgements. at no stage did the nrc claim ownership of indigenous language data collected with the project's funding. we were determined to break with the long, painful history of extractive research practices, in which non-indigenous researchers have collected language data from indigenous communities for their own purposes, sometimes even resulting in communities losing access to their language data (see @xcite , @xcite , @xcite , and @xcite ). ## sociolinguistic background there are about 70 indigenous languages from 10 distinct language families currently spoken in canada @xcite . most of these languages have complex morphology; they are polysynthetic or agglutinative. commonly, a single word carries the meaning of an entire clause in indo-european languages. all indigenous languages in canada were targeted by government policies that sought to eradicate them. these policies were implemented through legislation, such as the indian act, foot_1 which discouraged, and often made illegal, gathering for cultural practices and speaking ancestral languages. many indigenous children were forcibly removed from their communities and placed in compulsory boarding schools (known as residential schools) or adopted by non-indigenous families (known as the sixties scoop @xcite ). according to the truth and reconciliation commission of canada, the residential school system was "created for the purpose of separating aboriginal children from their families, in order to minimize and weaken family ties and cultural linkages" @xcite . the resilience of indigenous communities can be seen in the many ways that they have resisted assimilation and continued to teach, learn, and speak their languages @xcite . the benefits associated with the use of these languages are wide-ranging @xcite @xcite . for instance, there is a correlation between indigenous language use and a decrease in youth suicide rates on reserves in british columbia @xcite . however, many communities face decreasing numbers of first language (mother tongue) speakers, due to declining language transmission rates (norris, 2018). much indigenous language revitalization work in canada focuses on preservation of language through recording the speech of elders: recordings and transcriptions are a vital resource for language learning by younger generations. cree, n.o.s. 69,975 speakers inuktitut 36,185 speakers ojibway 20,470 speakers oji-cree dene 11,780 speakers montagnais (innu) 10,715 speakers mi'kmaq 7,140 speakers atikamekw 6,390 speakers plains cree 3,655 speakers blackfoot stoney swampy cree 1,755 speakers dakota mohawk 1,295 speakers carrier naskapi 1,350 speakers inuinnaqtun south slavey algonquin 1,730 speakers gitxsan woods cree michif 730 speakers tłıchǫ kwak'wala 430 speakers senćoŧen 5 speakers (too few speakers to show a circle on the graph) figure 1 (obtained from the statistics canada website) shows the number of speakers per language in 2016 (statistics canada, 2017). the languages underlined in red are those with which the ilt project has interacted in some way. these census numbers are controversial. this figure is included to give the non-expert reader a general idea of the number of speakers of each language; for detailed demographic information, one should consult experts on each individual language. early in the ilt project, owennatékha (brian maracle), the director of onkwawenna kentyohkwa (our language society), asked whether nrc would be able to create a software-based verb conjugator. onkwawenna kentyohkwa is an adult immersion school in the six nations grand river territory in ontario that takes students through 2000 hours of kanyen'kéha immersion over two years. kanyen'kéha is an iroquoian language, commonly known as "mohawk", spoken in territory that spans present-day ontario, quebec, and new york state. iroquoian languages are highly polysynthetic. learning and teaching verbs in kanyen'kéha is a formidable task. there are millions of conjugations for even the most common verbs. it is therefore only possible to create a verb conjugator with reasonable coverage in software, not on paper. verb roots in kanyen'kéha are bound morphemes: they do not, on their own, constitute words. a pronominal prefix, a verb root and an aspectual ending are always present (for commands the aspectual ending is null). a verb can contain pre-and post-pronominal prefixes and pre-aspectual suffixes. kanyen'kéha has 14 stand-alone or 'free' pronouns, and 72 bound pronouns, meaning the combinatorial inflectional possibilities are much larger than in english, french, or other european languages. this complexity adds to the difficulty of teaching the language: even learning how to properly conjugate a modest number of verbs requires a significant amount of work. for detailed information on kanyen'kéha syntax, see @xcite . in 2017, we began building the verb conjugator for kanyen'kéha described below @xcite . we are now building a verb conjugator for michif, an unrelated polysynthetic language. for each language, we have been working with members of the relevant community to develop a conjugator that does not replace learners' experience of studying verbal morphology at schools in the community, but that complements it. these conjugators rely on finite-state transducers (fsts) which are rule-based. rule-based approaches may seem outdated in contrast to statistical or neural methods. however, with most indigenous languages, existing corpora are not large enough to produce accurate statistical models. ## speech-based subprojects traditionally, indigenous languages in canada were spoken, foot_5 not written. thus, several ilt subprojects focused on applications of speech technology. ## other subprojects space is lacking to describe several other subprojects of the nrc project (for these, see @xcite ). they include subprojects carried out by external organizations (mostly indigenous-run) but funded by nrc, such as enhancement of online language courses for east cree and innu previously developed at carleton university, development of online courses for plains cree, kwak'wala, michif, and naskapi, improvements to a role-playing game with swampy cree content, two subprojects for training indigenous language activists in data collection methodologies, and data collection efforts for plains cree, kanyen'kéha, kwak'wala, michif, nsyilxcn, senćoŧen, tŝilhqot'in, and tsuut'ina. ## conclusions and future work one of the reviewers of this paper pointed out that its main scientific finding is that "money works!" strategically deployed, funding for research into technologies for neglected languages can have a significant impact. this reviewer even suggested that the project described here might have lessons for governments in other parts of the world which seek to help minority languages. there is a caveat: the research must be done respectfully, in collaboration with the communities who are the custodians of these languages. there should be no room in this field for scholars whose main goal is extracting "interesting" research without considering the linguistic needs of communities. our greatest challenge in this project was doing our best to build respectful relationships with communities. the two goals do not necessarily conflict. there are many interesting research themes that have the potential to help under-resourced languages. examples in this project include implementing verb conjugators, machine translation, and speech recognition for polysynthetic languages. but there are also low-hanging fruit, challenges that do not require advanced research -they can be tackled with today's technologies -but which, when overcome, can have linguistic benefits for communities. an example is the production of read-along audio books in indigenous languages. automating this process posed a technical challenge of only moderate difficulty, but educators find the end product very useful. our focus in phase ii is on making the technologies described above easier for indigenous communities to deploy themselves. for instance, we would like to make the read-along interface so user-friendly that there is no need to consult the nrc team to produce read-along versions of audio books (the team is having trouble keeping up with demand). we have a similar goal for text prediction on mobile devices. it will be harder to develop a framework that enables indigenous educators to build software-based verb conjugators for their languages without requiring the educators to have specialized it knowledge, but we are working on this as well. ideally, we will make all the technologies described above more user-friendly. all software developed by nrc's ilt project team will be released as open-source.