Educational Tools for Mapuzugun (2022)

Abstract: Mapuzugun is the language of the Mapuche people. Due to political and historical reasons, its number of speakers has decreased and the language has been excluded from the educational system in Chile and Argentina. For this reason, it is very important to support the revitalization of the Mapuzugun in all spaces and media of society. In this work we present a tool towards supporting educational activities of Mapuzugun, tailored to the characteristics of the language. The tool consists of three parts: design and development of an orthography detector and converter; a morphological analyzer; and an informal translator. We also present a case study with Mapuzugun students showing promising results. Short abstract in Mapuzugun: Tüfachi küzaw pegelfi kiñe zugun küzawpeyüm kelluaetew pu mapuzugun chillkatufe kimal kizu tañi zugun.

## introduction recent years have seen unprecedented progress for natural language processing (nlp) on almost every nlp subtask. along with research progress, several tools have been developed and are currently aiding millions of users every day. however, most of this progress is limited on a handful of languages @xcite . for example, learners of english can nowadays avail themselves to tools like grammarly; english speakers can use duolingo to start learning 38 languages, including hawaiian, navajo, as well as high valyrian and klingon. 1 the only option a mapuzugun speaker would have in practice, though, would be to use language technologies in a language other than her own (likely spanish). despite duolingo's commendable inclusion of hawaiian and navajo for english speakers, and of 1 as of march 2022. guaraní for spanish speakers, foot_0 learning resources for indigenous languages are hard to come by, let alone ones that incorporate language technologies in the educational setting in order to aid learners. in particular, it is undeniable that the development of nlp tools that reach the users lags further behind that nlp research itself @xcite . in this work, we develop a tool for educational use in an indigenous language of south america, mapuzugun. this tool was created by a speaker and instructor of the language and as such is tailored specifically to the instructional needs and linguistic characteristics of mapuzugun. importantly, this work shows how linguistic research (grammars), minimal community resources (dictionaries), and nlp research (e.g. fst-based morphological analyzers) can be transformed into tools useful to indigenous communities, in particular for efforts towards preservation and revitalization of endangered languages. our tool is publicly available through an online interface (in mapuzugun and spanish) at crahumadao.pythonanywhere. com. 3 ## the mapuzugun language mapuzugun (iso 639-3: arn) is an indigenous language of the americas spoken natively in chile and argentina, with an estimated 100 to 200 thousand speakers in chile and 27 to 60 thousand speakers in argentina @xcite . it is an isolate language and is classified as threatened by ethnologue, hence the critical importance of all documentary efforts. although the morphology of nouns is relatively simple, mapudungun verb morphology is highly agglutinative and complex. some analyses provide as many as 36 verb suffix slots @xcite . a typical complex verb form may consist of five or six morphemes. see example in ## orthography detection and transliteration the differences between the three orthographies are showcased in figure 3 . where "jampvzken" is written in ragileo, "llampüdken" in unificado and "llampüzken" in azümchefe, all three referring to the same mapudungun phonetics of the english word "butterfly". this example shows the relationship between the 'j' in ragileo with the 'll' in azümchefe and unificado. we identified and constructed the conversion tables between these orthographies. in total, for the unified-ragileo relationship, there are 10 differences that are shown in the utilizing these conversion tables makes it straightforward to detect the orthography of any given input, by following a process of round-trip translation. for example, if we assume the input is in ragileo, then if we convert to azümchefe (or unificado) and back to ragileo and the final output is the same as the original input, then the input is declared to be ragileo. if any of the intermediate translations fail it would have been exactly because our initial assumption of the input being in ragileo was false. if no changes happen in the translation process, then all orthographies represent the input in a similar manner. orthography converter given the differences between the orthographies, special care must be taken in graphemes that have another grapheme as a substring. an example of this is the unificado grapheme ng, which also contains the grapheme g, which in turn is used in the same writing system for another phoneme. or, cases in which three graphemes contain the same letter, such as the letter "l" in l, lh, and ll. the only orthography that does not have this internal problem is ragileo, because it uses unique letters for each mapuzugun phoneme. this makes conversion from ragileo to other orthographies straighforward, always taking care of the order of the transformations whose output can generate morpheme ambiguities during conversion. input orthography morphological morpheme analysis detector analysis translation the order that must be taken into account because if a morpheme is contained by another, it must first be disambiguated and then continue with other changes. in the case of ng and g, to go from unificado to ragileo or azümchefe, as long as there is a g and there is no n preceding it, it can be changed to q, therefore before making the transformations the ng must be checked, saving the result g) in an auxiliary variable to be able to convert later all gs of the unificado to q. once this last step is done, the auxiliary variable is removed and the g resulting from the change is put back. ## morphological analyzer the morphological analyzer is responsible for producing the possible segmentations: separating words into a composition of morphemes. ## conclusion and future work we have presented a system comprised of set of nlp tools appropriate for educational purposes in mapuzugun, an indigenous south american language, and we have demonstrated its usefulness through a small user study. our study also provided a guide for future improvements. as more data will hopefully become available in mapuzugun, we plan to incorporate more recent statistical machine learning components, both for the orthography converted and the morphological analyzer. we will also hopefully be able to deploy full-fledged machine translation systems to provide free-form translations of words or phrases to learners. many users would benefit by the incorporation of a text-to-speech component (as long as it is of high quality), that would also allow the teaching of mapuzugun pronunciation. going further, the tool could be complemented with a system that permits annotation of words and/or phrases in order to collect data for future tasks, as more users adopt it -especially if language instructors use our tool in their courses. we are also hoping to create an offline version of the tool to make it accessible in areas with low connectivity. we will also attempt to incorporate any available corpora of mapuzugun such as the those of @xcite and @xcite to use as educational examples. we release our code foot_5 in the hopes that more indigenous communities are able to use it to develop similar systems for their languages.