FLORES + Mayas: Generating Textual Resources to Foster the Development of Language Technologies for M ayan Languages (2025)

Abstract: A significant percentage of the population of Guatemala and Mexico belongs to various Mayan indigenous communities, for whom language barriers lead to social, economic, and digital exclusion. The Mayan languages spoken by these communities remain severely underrepresented in terms of digital resources, which prevents them from leveraging the latest advances in artificial intelligence. This project addresses that problem by means of: 1) the digitisation and release of multiple printed linguistic resources; 2) the development of a high-quality parallel machine translation (MT) evaluation corpus for six Mayan languages. In doing so, we are paving the way for the development of MT systems that will facilitate the access for Mayan speakers to essential services such as healthcare or legal aid. The resources are produced with the essential participation of indigenous communities, whereby native speakers provide the necessary translation services, QA, and linguistic expertise. The project is funded by the Google Academic Research Awards and carried out in collaboration with the Proyecto Lingüístico Francisco Marroquín Foundation in Guatemala.

## introduction recent advances in natural language processing (nlp) and artificial intelligence (ai) come with the caveat of needing a sufficiently large amount of data. these data are far from being available for the indigenous mayan languages, which cover a historical region comprising guatemala, belize, and southern mexico. our project "generating textual resources to foster the development of language technologies for mayan languages" aims at creating textual resources for mayan languages as a first step for their language communities to take advantage of recent ai advances. our two concrete goals are: digitising multiple printed linguistic resources and releasing them as data artefacts; and creating a parallel corpus, flores+ mayas, to establish a high-quality benchmark for the development and evaluation of machine translation (mt) systems for some mayan languages. this corpus will be obtained by translating the spanish side of the flo-res+ corpus foot_0 (goyal et al., 2022; nllb team et al., 2022), a de-facto standard for low-resource mt. recognising the importance of indigenous participation, summarised in the epigram "nothing about us without us", the universitat d'alacant has signed a formal collaboration agreement with the proyecto lingüístico francisco marroquín foundation foot_1 (fplfm), an indigenous, non-government organization from guatemala with a long history in terms of language documentation and preservation. they provide us with the physical media to be digitised and are also our main liaison with the mayan translation community in guatemala. @xcite the project is funded by the google academic research award (gara), a program open to professors at degree-granting institutions who are conducting research in the field of technology and computing. @xcite the project started at the beginning of 2025 and plans to be completed by year-end. all developments will be hosted on https://github. com/transducens/floresmayas under open licenses: cc by-sa 4.0 for flores+ mayas and a yet-to-be-decided license for digitised resources. the resulting documents will be further curated in order to be released as textual resources that may be used to train mt systems or language models (tanzer et al., 2024). given the historical lack of standardization of mayan orthography (lópez raquec, 1989), we will transcribe each resource into the corresponding modern standards.