Cree Corpus: A Collection of nêhiyawêwin Resources
Daniela Teodorescu, Josie Matalski, Delaney Lothian, Denilson Barbosa, Carrie Demmans Epp
Abstract
Plains Cree (nêhiyawêwin) is an Indigenous language that is spoken in Canada and the USA. It is the most widely spoken dialect of Cree and a morphologically complex language that is polysynthetic, highly inflective, and agglutinative. It is an extremely low resource language, with no existing corpus that is both available and prepared for supporting the development of language technologies. To support nêhiyawêwin revitalization and preservation, we developed a corpus covering diverse genres, time periods, and texts for a variety of intended audiences. The data has been verified and cleaned; it is ready for use in developing language technologies for nêhiyawêwin. The corpus includes the corresponding English phrases or audio files where available. We demonstrate the utility of the corpus through its community use and its use to build language technologies that can provide the types of support that community members have expressed are desirable. The corpus is available for public use.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{teodorescu-etal-2022-cree,
title = "{C}ree Corpus: A Collection of n{\^e}hiyaw{\^e}win Resources",
author = "Teodorescu, Daniela and
Matalski, Josie and
Lothian, Delaney and
Barbosa, Denilson and
Demmans Epp, Carrie",
editor = "Muresan, Smaranda and
Nakov, Preslav and
Villavicencio, Aline",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = may,
year = "2022",
address = "Dublin, Ireland",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.440/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.440",
pages = "6354--6364"
}