Natural Language Generation for Polysynthetic Languages: Language Teaching and Learning Software for Kanyen’kéha (Mohawk)

Greg Lessard, Nathan Brinklow, Michael Levison


Abstract
Kanyen’kéha (in English, Mohawk) is an Iroquoian language spoken primarily in Eastern Canada (Ontario, Québec). Classified as endangered, it has only a small number of speakers and very few younger native speakers. Consequently, teachers and courses, teaching materials and software are urgently needed. In the case of software, the polysynthetic nature of Kanyen’kéha means that the number of possible combinations grows exponentially and soon surpasses attempts to capture variant forms by hand. It is in this context that we describe an attempt to produce language teaching materials based on a generative approach. A natural language generation environment (ivi/Vinci) embedded in a web environment (VinciLingua) makes it possible to produce, by rule, variant forms of indefinite complexity. These may be used as models to explore, or as materials to which learners respond. Generated materials may take the form of written text, oral utterances, or images; responses may be typed on a keyboard, gestural (using a mouse) or, to a limited extent, oral. The software also provides complex orthographic, morphological and syntactic analysis of learner productions. We describe the trajectory of development of materials for a suite of four courses on Kanyen’kéha, the first of which will be taught in the fall of 2018.
Anthology ID:
W18-4805
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Modeling of Polysynthetic Languages
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Editor:
Judith L. Klavans
Venue:
PYLO
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
41–52
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-4805
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Greg Lessard, Nathan Brinklow, and Michael Levison. 2018. Natural Language Generation for Polysynthetic Languages: Language Teaching and Learning Software for Kanyen’kéha (Mohawk). In Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Modeling of Polysynthetic Languages, pages 41–52, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Natural Language Generation for Polysynthetic Languages: Language Teaching and Learning Software for Kanyen’kéha (Mohawk) (Lessard et al., PYLO 2018)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-4805.pdf