Félix Arturo Oncevay Marcos

• Pontifical Catholic University of Peru

This paper presents the results of the first shared task about the creation of educational materials for three indigenous languages of the Americas.The task proposes to automatically generate variations of sentences according to linguistic features that could be used for grammar exercises.The languages involved in this task are Bribri, Maya, and Gu...

Large multilingual models have inspired a new class of word alignment methods, which work well for the model's pretraining languages. However, the languages most in need of automatic alignment are low-resource and, thus, not typically included in the pretraining data. In this work, we ask: How do modern aligners perform on unseen languages, and are...

Little attention has been paid to the development of human language technology for truly low-resource languages—i.e., languages with limited amounts of digitally available text data, such as Indigenous languages. However, it has been shown that pretrained multilingual models are able to perform crosslingual transfer in a zero-shot setting even for...

Indigenous languages, including those from the Americas, have received very little attention from the machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) communities. To tackle the resulting lack of systems for these languages and the accompanying social inequalities affecting their speakers, we conduct the second AmericasNLP competition (a...

Language modelling and machine translation tasks mostly use subword or character inputs, but syllables are seldom used. Syllables provide shorter sequences than characters, require less-specialised extracting rules than morphemes, and their segmentation is not impacted by the corpus size. In this study, we first explore the potential of syllables f...

In this paper, we launch a new Universal Dependencies treebank for an endangered language from Amazonia: Kakataibo, a Panoan language spoken in Peru. We first discuss the collaborative methodology implemented, which proved effective to create a treebank in the context of a Computational Linguistic course for undergraduates. Then, we describe the ge...

The Universal Morphology (UniMorph) project is a collaborative effort providing broad-coverage instantiated normalized morphological inflection tables for hundreds of diverse world languages. The project comprises two major thrusts: a language-independent feature schema for rich morphological annotation and a type-level resource of annotated data i...

Theoretical work in morphological typology offers the possibility of measuring morphological diversity on a continuous scale. However, literature in Natural Language Processing (NLP) typically labels a whole language with a strict type of morphology, e.g. fusional or agglutinative. In this work, we propose to reduce the rigidity of such claims, by...

Morphologically-rich polysynthetic languages present a challenge for NLP systems due to data sparsity, and a common strategy to handle this issue is to apply subword segmentation. We investigate a wide variety of supervised and unsupervised morphological segmentation methods for four polysynthetic languages: Nahuatl, Raramuri, Shipibo-Konibo, and W...

This paper presents the results of the 2021 Shared Task on Open Machine Translation for Indigenous Languages of the Americas. The shared task featured two independent tracks, and participants submitted machine translation systems for up to 10 indigenous languages. Overall, 8 teams participated with a total of 214 submissions. We provided training s...

Pretrained multilingual models are able to perform cross-lingual transfer in a zero-shot setting, even for languages unseen during pretraining. However, prior work evaluating performance on unseen languages has largely been limited to low-level, syntactic tasks, and it remains unclear if zero-shot learning of high-level, semantic tasks is possible...

Language modelling is regularly analysed at word, subword or character units, but syllables are seldom used. Syllables provide shorter sequences than characters, they can be extracted with rules, and their segmentation typically requires less specialised effort than identifying morphemes. We reconsider syllables for an open-vocabulary generation ta...

Civil unrest is public manifestations, where people demonstrate their position for different causes. Sometimes, violent events or riots are unleashed in this kind of events, and these can be revealed from tweets posted by involved people. This study describes a methodology to detect riots within the time of a protest to identify potential adverse d...

In hierarchical text classification, we perform a sequence of inference steps to predict the category of a document from top to bottom of a given class taxonomy. Most of the studies have focused on developing novels neural network architectures to deal with the hierarchical structure, but we prefer to look for efficient ways to strengthen a baselin...

Sparse language vectors from linguistic typology databases and learned embeddings from tasks like multilingual machine translation have been investigated in isolation, without analysing how they could benefit from each other's language characterisation. We propose to fuse both views using singular vector canonical correlation analysis and study wha...

Following the methods and tools developed by Hammarström, Castermans, Forkel et al. (2018) for the simultaneous visualization of the vitality status and degree of documentation of the world’s languages, this paper provides a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the achievements and the challenges in the documentation and description of Peruvian...

Language identification is an elemental task in natural language processing, where corpus-based methods reign the state-of-the-art results in multi-lingual setups. However, there is a need to extend this application to other scenarios with scarce data and multiple classes to face, analyzing which of the most well-known methods is the best fit. In t...

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is the field that seeks to determine the correct sense of a word in a given context. In this paper, we present a WSD method based on random walks over a dependency tree, whose nodes are word-senses from the WordNet. Besides, our method incorporates prior knowledge about the frequency of use of the word-senses. We obs...

Natural Language Processing deals with the understanding and generation of texts through computer programs. There are many different functionalities used in this area, but among them there are some functions that are the support of the remaining ones. These methods are related to the core processing of the morphology of the language (such as lemmat...

There are several native languages in Peru which are mostly agglutinative. These languages are transmitted from generation to generation mainly in oral form, causing different forms of writing across different communities. For this reason, there are recent efforts to standardize the spelling in the written texts, and it would be beneficial to suppo...

The plant species identification is a manual process performed mainly by botanical scientists based on their experience. In order to improve this task, several plant classification processes has been proposed applying pattern recognition. In this work, we propose a method combining three visual attributes of leaves: boundary shape, texture and colo...