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Nenek: a cloud-based collaboration platform for the management of Amerindian language resources

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Abstract

This article presents Nenek: A cloud-based collaboration platform for language documentation of underresourced languages. Nenek is based on a crowdsourcing scheme that supports native speakers, indigenous associations, government agencies and researchers in the creation of virtual communities of minority language speakers on the Internet. Nenek includes a set of web tools that enables users to work collaboratively on language documentation tasks, build lexicographic assets and produce new language resources. This platform includes a three-stage management model to control the acquisition of existent language resources, the manufacturing of new resources, as well as their distribution within the virtual community and to the general public. In the acquisition stage, existent language resources are either automatically extracted from the web by a crawler or received through donations from users who participate in a monolingual social network. In the manufacturing stage, lexicographic and collaborative tools enable users to build new resources while the acquired and manufactured resources are published in the diffusion stage, either within the virtual community or publicly. We present a life cycle mapping scheme that registers the transformations of the language resources at each of the three stages of language resource management. This scheme also traces the utilization and diffusion of each resource produced by the virtual community. The paper includes a case study in which we present the use of the Nenek platform in a language documentation project of a Mayan language spoken in Mexico's Gulf coast region called Huastec. This case study reveals Nenek's efficiency in terms of acquisition, annotation, manufacturing and diffusion of language resources; it also discusses the participation of the members of the virtual community.

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Notes

  1. This is the case, for example, in Mexico, where languages such as Maya or some variants of Nahuatl are notably more present online than other minority languages. Although the online resources of these prominent minority languages are insignificant when compared to the internet presence of majority languages such as English or Spanish, there is a considerable amount of online repositories, texts, transcriptions and dictionaries available, for example in the already mentioned archives. In turn, for languages with less number of speakers as Huastec only a few dictionaries are available.

  2. The resource accessibility relates to certain restrictions that respect the decision of the depositors who want to control their resources and require the safeguarding of sensitive ritual information or the protection of author rights. For instance, the AILLA archive contains hundreds of Huastec language resources deposited by three distinguished researchers but 80 % of them are protected by a password, which results in a reduced number of free resources. The ELAR archive includes hundreds of resources about an endangered variant of the Huastec language that have been deposited by one single depositor but the access to resources depends on a positive response form the depositor to the request.

  3. The metadata are based on the IMDI format (http://www.mpi.nl/imdi).

  4. This makes sense when managing minority languages, since they commonly lack a formal and standardized writing system. Incorrect syntaxes could introduce expressions that are not in use to the lexicons and libraries. In the case of the multimedia formats, incorrect cultural assets could be added to the repositories without supervision of native speakers, researchers or indigenous associations because it is quite common to confuse the dresses, food, and living places of different cultures.

  5. The traditional electronic document management systems (EDMS) enable organizations to manage documents throughout the life cycle, from creation to destruction (Adam 2008) but in Nenek we register the transformations of the language resources through the acquisition, manufacturing and diffusion stages and the destruction of resources is not contemplated.

  6. Our team is currently working on stemming and lemmatization mechanisms, which will be included in the lexicographical tool.

  7. The team that proposed the automatization method of the lexeme extraction will report its description as well as the precision evaluation of the spell checker in a forthcoming article.

  8. This category is mainly produced by organizations and associations.

  9. Of course, the databases generated by the virtual community can be helpful for researchers to conduct corpus analysis, discourse studies of internet-forum communications, and language documentation about minority languages.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the reviewers for their valuable feedback. The Nenek project is sponsored through a grant from the Mexican Secretary of Public Education and the National Council of Science and Technology (SEP-Conacyt research Grant CB-2012-180863). The work presented in this paper has been partially supported by EU under the COST programme Action IC1305, Network for Sustainable Ultrascale Computing (NESUS)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cinvestav, Tamaulipas, Mexico

    J. L. Gonzalez & Victor J. Sosa-Sosa

  2. FCSH-UASLP, San Luis Potosi, Mexico

    Anuschka van’t Hooft

  3. ARCOS-UC3M, Madrid, Spain

    Jesus Carretero

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  1. J. L. Gonzalez
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  2. Anuschka van’t Hooft
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  3. Jesus Carretero
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  4. Victor J. Sosa-Sosa
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Correspondence to J. L. Gonzalez.

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Gonzalez, J.L., van’t Hooft, A., Carretero, J. et al. Nenek: a cloud-based collaboration platform for the management of Amerindian language resources. Lang Resources & Evaluation 51, 897–925 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-016-9361-8

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