Technology and Language Revitalization: A Roadmap for the Mvskoke Language (2024)

Abstract: This paper is a discussion of how NLP can come alongside community efforts to aid in revitalizing the Mvskoke language. Mvskoke is a language indigenous to the southeastern United States that has seen an increase in language revitalization efforts in the last few years. This paper presents an overview of available resources in Mvskoke, an exploration of relevant NLP tasks and related work in endangered language contexts, and applications to language revitalization.

## introduction as nlp research matures and computational linguistic technologies enter the commercial realm, low-resource and endangered languages are seeing a greater gap between what is possible for highresource languages, and what is available for endangered language communities. work is needed to reverse this trend and include diverse languages in the forefront of language technology. the technology cannot be an end in itself -rather the goal of developing nlp tools should be to support the ongoing work of the endangered language community. the mvskoke 1 have several ongoing language revitalization efforts. this paper explores some of the techniques that have been employed in other low-data situations and how they might be helpful for the mvskoke language. ## mvskoke language resources mvskoke is a smaller language group than cherokee, which has a growing nlp community, but has more speakers than seneca, which is seeing great strides in both nlp research and language liketv to sit likis "i have sat down" likes "s/he sat down" kakes "(of two) they sit down" vpokes "(of three or more) they sit down" likepvs "have a seat!" likvranis "i will sit" ohliketska "are you sitting (up there)?" revitalization @xcite . we can take cues from other indigenous language communities in developing nlp tools for mvskoke based on the size and type of resources available. this section contains an overview of available resources. ## ethical considerations due to the painful history of colonization and even recent data misuse, indigenous people are wary of allowing sensitive documents and recordings to be viewed by those outside the tribe. therefore, there is an active push for tribes to collect and maintain their own language data. te hiku media, an organization active in māori language revitalization, has written on concerns about the use of indigenous language data in training ai, and has created guidelines for communities to write their own data licenses @xcite . a digital corpus of mvskoke language materials would need to be treated with care and dignity, and any use of the data to train nlp systems should benefit the tribal community. ## conclusion this survey presents the current state of resource availability and development of nlp tools for the muscogee language. also examined are challenges and steps towards the future development of nlp tools and how they can be applied to the goals of language revitalization in the muscogee community. shiyue zhang, ben frey, and mohit bansal. 2022. how can nlp help revitalize endangered languages? a case study and roadmap for the cherokee language. in proceedings of the 60th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics (volume 1: long papers), pages 1529-1541, dublin, ireland. association for computational linguistics.